Posts Tagged ‘wholeness’
Your Internal Magic
Liberating the Body
Chapter Six
YOUR INTERNAL MAGIC
THE PEAKS OF EXPERIENCE
When you allow your body to ‘play’ with possible movements and feelings; when you allow your emotions to flow and stretch themselves through their huge range; when you unleash your mind to soar and swoop amidst its immense territory of memory and experience; when you permit the unknown in you to move, recognise itself and cry out its song, you stand upon the very peaks of your experience. This is your wholeness knowing itself. This is the wonder of inner-directed movement. When these experiences come again and again, you will know them as the greatest moments in your life. They are moments that will add colour to all that comes afterwards.
Getting the Best Out Of Your Practise
The central secret of inner-directed movement is the open state of mind and body. In using this ‘piano key‘ feeling and waiting for your being to declare itself spontaneously there is a key that unlocks a fullness of experience otherwise missing.
The openness, the spontaneity, and the fullness of experience are intermeshed. Understanding this enables you to find the greatest satisfaction in yourself through inner-directed movement. Missing this point you may take another direction. If you miss this point you may experience creative movement, or improvisation dance, or movement to music – but you will not be experiencing inner-directed movement.
When you experience yourself as a seed growing, or as the element of water, or express yourself in the open approach, the end result is not just a pleasant period of physical movement. If it were, this book might just as well be called Movement to Music.
If you were only a body that might be enough. You are more than just a mass of chemical and biological processes. You have emotions, you have hopes and fears. You are an integral part of all you see around you as external. You are the wonder of life.
When you open to the totality of yourself and allow its expression you will experience excitement. You will know that more of yourself than usual is involved in what is happening to you. Much of what emerges will be unexpected, and creative.
If, having used the graded approaches described, you have not felt that excitement, not touched the unexpected, there is still more for you to discover. But if you have felt the magic, there is no end to it. It continues forever, creative and new, though you bathe in it a thousand times.
Using Your Ability to Relax
The power to reach into your unconscious resources takes more than determination. To achieve it the conscious mind needs to become quiet and receptive. I am not suggesting that the passive, receptive state of mind is superior to the dynamic, focused will. However, each is an aspect of our total range of mental function. Each accesses different possibilities or processes. Having one without the other is as incomplete as having an accelerator pedal without a brake on a car. Although these functions on a car are totally at odds with each other, they are both necessary. The ability to become passive and yielding is as vitally necessary as being active and resolute if we are to be whole.
The power of this state of mind has been observed by men and women in other cultures for thousands of years. Its importance has been recognised as so great that the yielding or quiet soul has been depicted as of supreme importance in seeking personal healing and enlightenment. This mental condition has frequently been symbolised as a holy virgin, the mother of God. In Christianity we see this represented by the Virgin Mary. Paraphrasing what she represents one can say that when the soul does not hold preconceptions, then it can conceive of and give birth to its own innate potentials – represented by Christ, the healing and regenerating process within human beings. In Buddhism a similar process is represented by Maya the virgin mother of Buddha.
Joseph Campbell says in his book Myths To Live By – Bantam – “There are myths and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections; Second Comings, Judgements and the rest, in all the great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order, and its forces, in symbolic terms.”
If your experience of inner-directed movement is already spontaneous and creative, then you already know how to ‘wait’ or yield. If not, use the approach in which simulated yawning is allowed to lead into spontaneous yawns and movements until you feel at ease with the unwilled movements your body makes. Also try the experiment of pushing the arm against the wall and allowing it to rise by itself. Don’t discard whatever level of response you get in the practice. Carry on and enjoy it, letting a little more yielding enter it as you gain trust in yourself.
Remember that inner-directed movements do not usually start with a thunder clap of power that overrules your own will. They arise gently, almost imperceptibly. By allowing what are tiny urges to move, like the almost imperceptible impulse to breathe while your body is quiet, the movements get stronger and more power flows.
Help If You Cannot Let Go
Sometimes a major tension, physical or attitudinal, gets in the way of being able to let spontaneous movement happen. Three special techniques might be useful. They are not to be used on the same day, but separately, and as you have need.
Help Method One
Give yourself up to half an hour for this – shorter or longer as your needs dictate.
1 – If you are aware of tension in yourself, instead of trying to drop or relax the tension, allow it to become stronger. Be willing to experience it deeply.
2 – Do this by standing in your ‘space’ as usual, with appropriate music playing. Then take time to let the tension really be felt and allowed to direct your body posture, feelings and any movements.
3 – The tension may get worse as it is discharged, so be prepared for this. It is a natural way the body does its own housekeeping.
Help Method Two
Prepare your space with fairly active music. Plan to give up to an hour to this. Keep the music playing for that length of time.
1 – Move, or dance, to the music in any way that you can. It doesn’t matter how awkward you feel, how stiff, how much resistance you have to this – do it! Keep going no matter what, until you can feel the blocks or tensions melting and easy spontaneous movement emerging.
2 – You may need more than one session to break through the physical tensions, fears and emotions that imprison you.
In his book Black Butterfly, Richard Moss describes the experience of an elderly woman, dying of cancer, who was taking part in a spontaneous movement class he was leading. The woman was supposed to be dancing freely to the music, but was hardly moving. When he asked her why, she said it was because of her illness. He said to her, “You are not dead yet – move.” She did so and to her amazement the movements got easier and she experienced a shift of awareness in which she realised she was an unseparated part of an ocean of life. Her physical illness was totally healed.
Help Method Three
Instead of movement you can use your voice. Take about fifteen to thirty minutes for this. Use quiet background music as an aid to giving yourself permission to make sounds. But be careful of pushing your voice too far as you may become hoarse.
1 – Stand with eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing rhythm. Slowly deepen it but do not speed it up. If anything make it slower and fuller.
2 – When you feel at ease with this add a sound to the outbreath. It is easiest to use the aaaaahhhh sound at first.
3 – Keep this going until you feel the sound flowing out easily and reasonably smoothly. Then move the sound around by changing the volume. Make it soft, make it loud. Try the different volumes of your voice and the different levels of power.
4 – Next try shifting the feeling quality. Make different sounds to see what variety of feelings you can discover or express. If you hit a satisfying sound, something you can enjoy, move it to express laughter, change it into sadness, thoughtfulness, anger, hurt – in fact try it in all sorts of pitches and feeling qualities.
5 – This can be very entertaining because the voice is an incredible instrument, so enjoy yourself with the instrument you have played since babyhood. If words find their way into what you are doing let them – but see what range of feelings you can express with them.
6 – When you have finished playing the instrument of your voice, relax quietly on the floor for a minute or so. This quiet period after the voice exercise is often very healing. It can produce very real internal peace.
Some Results of Inner-Directed Movement
Some of the ways the body self-regulates are not comfortable. Some people do not like sneezing or vomiting. Yet these uncomfortable movements are necessary at times to help keep the balance in your being. Such cleansing, not only of the body, but also of the emotions, IS occasionally a part of inner-directed movement. An ‘emotional sneeze’ might rid you of an emotion such as guilt or grief that you are unconsciously holding onto and causing stress in your body – just as a physical sneeze gets rid of harmful dust or bacteria. In Seitai the Japanese approach, it is emphasised that at the beginning of the practice the body may discharge toxins that have been harboured for many years. Therefore the practitioner might perspire more heavily than usual. Sometimes masses of mucous is discharged from the nose during a practice. Noguchi also says that occasionally the person even sees something like a piece of glass come out of their body after having existed there for years from an injury. Quite rarely, but worth mentioning, as the effects of past shock or hurt are got rid of, an old scar or mark from long past might show on the body again for a short period. More commonly however, it is negative emotions and memories we are cleansed of during the practice.
The overall action of inner-directed movement appears to be toward a reasonable level of wholeness. That is, the opposites of ones nature are allowed expression until they find balance. The healing processes in the body are made more efficient, and there is an attempt to do what I have called the backlog of ‘housework’. That is, old feelings we may have been holding onto to our detriment are discharged.
Once the physical and mental housework is done, then the process moves toward integrating and reviewing your life experience, to draw out of it what lessons, insights and creative ideas, you have gathered. Some of the Eastern practices see this as a spiritual change in which the person becomes more aware of their links with the rest of nature.
You Have Many Senses
When your mind, voice and emotions are expressing alongside your body movements, as occurs spontaneously during inner-directed movement, something very special happens. Old patterns of movement, behaviour, and emotions are played out in what arises during practice. Then gradually new or creative forms of expression arise. You break through the old patterns to discover a wider fuller you.
As you emerge from these restrictions, you will find your ability to see what is going on around you deepens. Your senses are not restricted to your sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell.
Very often the full range of our emotions have not opened. This is largely because muscular stiffness, physical tension, emotions injuries or hurt from the past, keep us from fully responding to each moment of experience. As ones body becomes more mobile; as emotional debris is cleared; as old rigid concepts are cleared from the mind, new levels of being able to sense other people arise.
When we are still cluttered with old hurts or rigid feelings, we may see the physical movements of people and animals; we may see the light reflected from their bodies, we might feel whether they are warm or cold, wet or dry, and experience their perfume – but we would fail altogether to see or understand what motivated, moved, impelled or disturbed them. We would not perceive their emotions. Their state of mind and body would not be visible us.
What You Can Gain
`Colin explains this from his own personal experience of inner-directed movement.
“To understand what a change came about in me you must realise that for all my teenage years I was painfully shy. I remember that even at fifteen when the whole school assembled each morning to sing a hymn, I found it painful to be visible in such a large group of people. I wasn’t standing in front of everyone. I was just mixed in with my class. Nevertheless it was agony.
“Inner-directed movement has helped me let go of some of those feelings that had haunted me since those years. Even though I didn’t use music as a background to the practice, I found myself doing a lot of stamping dances. To me it felt just as if I had been taught some Red Indian tribal dance. I was chanting to the movements too. And there was a lot of power in stamping. It made me feel strong physically and emotionally. I had never before in my life made those sort of movements or felt those feelings. Somehow they enlarged me, because beforehand I didn’t know I had it in me.
“At one time the dance movements were more African. I remember the pleasure that I felt when, like an African chief calling to the tribe, I roused them through my movements and chanting. The power in my voice was such that I boomed out feelings and commands with intense emotion. It was a wonderful experience to feel my body filled with strength and self assurance. It was almost as good as having lived it, so the feelings were ones I can now find in my everyday life. My son was still a baby at the time and I found I began to hold him differently. I felt my own body communicating strength and enjoyment of life to him – maybe even reverence of life. Sometimes during practice I had even felt what seemed to me the way I felt as a baby, and from this I was able to relate more fully to my small son.
“Other things I did during the practice had helped me experience the flow of love through me, and this has become a part of the way I relate to other people too. Not only do I feel it in myself, but from the experience of it I can see it operating in other people, even in animals. Sometimes I will see it pouring out of the eyes of a mother with her child, or in the face and posture of a couple. If they catch my eye a sort of instant recognition occurs. They know I have shared what they are experiencing and they smile.”
What Colin says is that until he had experienced certain emotions or feelings he could not see them in other people or in nature. Once his repertoire or range of experience had been enlarged, there was a lot more to see and connect with in the world.
In an article on inner-directed movement appearing in Harpers and Queen, ([1]) Leslie Kenton says:
“Often, as a result of trauma, life stress and social or family situations which are not naturally supportive of individual growth and development, we become separated from our own feeling sense or we tend to relegate it to the level of insignificance. When this happens ones life tends to become strongly habitual, mechanical, and eventually largely unsatisfying, no matter what kind of worldly success, excitement and glitter it may contain. For any real sense of joy, satisfaction or meaning can only come when the inner and outer being are linked up and when, what Crisp calls the feeling sense is allowed the freedom to regulate both physiological and psychological processes.”
Inner-directed movements help you develop an extended repertoire of physical expression. Because the body and personality are united, this means you have a greater range of responses to other people and events, and a greater awareness of what you see around you.
Sexuality
To give an idea of how inner-directed movement relates to sex, it is helpful to think of how a plant puts forth its sexuality – its flower. The flower is produced only at a certain point in the growth or cycle of the plant, and the flower is usually very different in shape and colour to the leaves or stem. The visual experience of watching a plant form a small bud that gradually grows and opens to a flower is exciting. The process is vulnerable though. If you think of something interfering with the flowering, inhibiting it at some level, then the flower exists, perhaps only as potential, but is not yet functioning fully.
The complex opening of human personality and sexuality has some kinship with this. Certain aspects of it can easily be inhibited in their flowering – perhaps the materials of experience are not yet sufficient – or the spontaneous instincts which usually inform and shape the maturing are withheld, suppressed, turned away from their task and full opening. Because inner-directed movement builds a link between your natural inner life and your conscious self, any aspects of your possible growth which have not emerged may be allowed. This is not an overnight thing, but it is a wonderful possibility. In fact few of us can reach maturity without some aspect of our nature, whether sexual, emotional or mental, being left behind, hurt or perhaps not given enough attention because other areas of activity were demanded by the needs of the time.
The action of inner-directed movement takes you away from the specific external needs which may have caused imbalancing tendencies in your nature. Because you let go of particular surface directions – because you do not set out to perform specific exercises, or work on particular issues, your internal self-regulating function can begin to express the areas of your nature that have been inhibited.
The Mind and Emotions
After some weeks of teaching a group of people in the small town of Porlock in Somerset, Julie, a woman in the group, told me something new had come into her life from what we had been practising. She said, “I never knew before that I have an inner life. This is such a wonderful thing for me.”
My understanding of what Julie was telling me was that she had never previously known what riches of experience and creativity, of insight and perception she already owned. She had thought of herself as just another housewife and mother, not unintelligent, but an unimportant person among billions of other unremarkable people living and dying.
The treasure Julie found that can be discovered through inner-directed movement is not to be mistaken with the realisation of intelligence or personal ability. A young and brilliant college student, Len, was recently describing to me his own realisation of his inner life through this practice. He said:
“I know this may sound strange, but the most powerful thing for me was that I realised I am alive. The realisation was accompanied by the sense of being life. I now know I am life and life is not just a chemical reaction or a set of biological drives or responses. As life I am always exploring, reaching out, becoming, learning what I am capable of and what I am. Just to exist is itself a great pleasure and miracle.”
As with Julie, Len’s realisation during inner-directed movement was not about his own intellectual ability or personal value. He had already proved his intellectual brilliance and ability in his scholastic performance. This had not given him the sense of being alive and liberated though. The contact with his own vital inner life enabled him to realise he was more than he thought he was. He learned through his own experience that the essential part of himself did not begin or end with his body, his emotions or his thoughts. From this arose a sense of freedom and liberation he had not known before.
Len’s changed experience of life was the result of just a few sessions of inner directed movement using the open approach. Previously he had been very reticent in relationships, yet often felt lonely. As he learned to let his own love shine out, he found it easier to make friends. He says:
“At first I found it difficult to let go enough for my body to freely express. When I did learn to do this my movements were very strong. At the time I was lying on my bed because my movements had started from quietness and stillness. They became so strong I fell off the bed at one point. My impression was that without realising it I had been holding back enormous amounts of my own energy. It was when I let the full current of my energy be expressed that I could achieve a new experience of myself. It is like having a dimmer switch on a light in an internal room, and all the time you have it just glimmering, and the room looks dark and dismal. Then one day you turn the power up and the whole room is transformed. All the colours glow, and features not seen before stand out.”
For many people this sort of release only occurs in times of crisis, high emotion, or if they are challenged by a public appearance and let themselves express at full power. At other times the dimming effect of social or intellectual conditioning anxieties, or not knowing how to let go, make us feel less than we really are. In fact you are more than you have ever believed.
Touching this vastness brings with it a sense of great wonder. In a recent letter to me Len describes what he feels when he touches what he calls ‘life’ through inner-directed movement.
“When I remember life and cry, as I am now, it is not sadness, it is everything. It is the beauty, the tragedy, the joy, the vastness, the thrill, the miracle, the mystery. It is a love from the depths of life of all creatures who have the courage to love, to embrace life in its vastness. From the firefly flashing its statement to the night, or the sparrow fetching worms for its young, to the dog running with joy toward me.”
Inner-directed movement gives you access to a new and vital experience of yourself outside the patterns of emotion and trains of thought from which you usually erect your self image. It leads to a discovery of your own unique inner life more fully than most forms of meditation or mental disciplines.
You Are Life – Live It
Apart from the sort of experience Len described, you already have a remarkable dimension of yourself you may be overlooking. It may not seem important, yet many people who use inner-directed movement learn to see it as a doorway of hope.
It can be explained by you imagining a scene in the long past. You are on a primeval river bed looking at the thick mud on the banks and gazing at the semi tropical plants and trees. As you watch, a small deer is pursued by a prehistoric human being. The ancient human hunter runs after the animal across the mud leaving evident footprints.
The day has passed, the mud has dried, another day has begun. The hunter comes back to the river bank. It is obvious he is there for water. With the caution necessary in this untamed environment he approaches the river and drinks. As he straightens and turns to go he notices the baked footprints. He follows their line with evident excitement. You sense he is reading the prints and feeling again the emotions written into the fluid movements now baked dry and preserved. He puts his feet into the prints and a look of strangeness comes onto his face. You share this magical moment with him as for the first time he realises his individual existence and feels with an almost painful emotion that he is looking back at himself in the footprints.
He looks down at his body, his hands, his feet, seeing them for the first time in this new light of self-awareness. Then he walks slowly to where there is still wet mud, left wet from the shrinking river after recent rains. Purposefully he places his foot in the mud, removes it and looks at the result, making a sound as an animal might as it declares its existence during mating. He again places his foot in the mud, and twice more, until the four prints make a cross, with the large toe of each print at the centre. He stands staring for a long time oblivious of his surroundings, in awe at what he has done.
This scene is not pure fantasy. Something like it must have occurred to a female or male human sometime in the dawn of history. It portrays the life of the instinctive animal, already on the verge of a new kind of awareness, crossing the threshold to self-awareness for the first time. Until that point all the actions, all the reactions, all the inner life of that creature arose out of instinctive drives or group information. All actions were performed in relationship to some real need such as hunger, mating, running from danger. The threshold crossed was the realisation that an action can be performed for no external need at all. It can be done for no reason other than curiosity, play, an exercise of mind. And so the first work of art arose – the first imprints in the mud that were not the result of the hunter chasing the animal, or running for safety, but just because!
Until that moment the human animal could only live within very marked boundaries. Beyond what was instinctively prompted; beyond what was feared; beyond what was lusted for; beyond what was the custom of the group – you could not go. The footprint in the mud stepped completely beyond those boundaries. It was freedom after millions of years of unconsciousness and instinctive behaviour. It was an open door to infinite variety of action and feeling. It was frightening and disturbing because freedom means no set rules, the unknown, the yet to be. It was stupendous.
It is impossible to describe all the implications of the ‘cross of footprints’. Without it we would be imprisoned within certain very restricted reactions – a small repertoire – to our environment. Our response would be limited to what we had inherited through our instincts and possibly learnt through painful experience. Human beings have a massive potential intelligence, but many of us are still extraordinarily limited in our repertoire of behavioural responses. We still haven’t quite taken in the fantastic meaning of art and music. We still haven’t really read the message left on the wall by the cave dweller who painted an outline of their hand, or fashioned the image of a bison, or who created symbols and ideas of gods and God, or pissed a pattern in the snow.
The message reads – I have found a new freedom. I have become more than I was. I am the creator.
Perhaps because we have developed a cultural attitude that splits things up, that separates the body and mind, the spirit and the flesh, we find it difficult at first to believe that such freedom, such realisation, can come about by allowing the body to move and express freely. Life is not a series of compartments. Our being is an integrated whole. If you allow your body freedom of movement, if you allow your body to go beyond what it has done before, then you are allowing your mind and emotions to do the same. You have gone beyond yourself. You have transcended what you were.
Of course the footprints in the mud story is just an example. But whatever it was that allowed human beings to paint, to imagine, to behave in ways that were outside of the necessary survival behaviour, opened the door to music, to variety, to drama, freedom of the senses and rigid roles. It means that a person with a broken body need not have a broken soul. They are limited only by their ability to imagine and experience. We are no longer limited by being born a certain sex, or by our own or other peoples ideas.
You are an integral part of a whole. Life is not trying to control or destroy you. You can take your place within the scheme of things if you wish. Your connection with the whole is through your own intuitive response to life. You can find this by allowing the spontaneous in you to emerge and declare itself. Then you will see for yourself that from the cosmic viewpoint the opposites of life and death do not have the same importance you attach to them while you only see life through your physical senses and culturally split viewpoint.
The Spirit
The film ET. captures our heart and imagination because it depicts our own longing to find a connection with life beyond our physical limitations. If our feelings are not dead, ET. speaks to us through them. The story of ET. depicts being trapped and dying in an environment other than the one our whole being can thrive in. ET. elicits longings in us to share the life of something beyond Earth.
This lost creature from a wider life, a more inclusive life, a more powerful life, a more connected life, is lost, trapped and injured here on Earth. It is the story of the human spirit and it’s desire to express its innate wonder again. It is the drama of how humans long for a connection with life that transcends time, space and death. It is a desire for wholeness.
People frequently describe the essence of what they find through inner-directed movement as touching life itself, as the life-force, as something which enables them to be free of things that shackled them, or that healed them of major illness. If this wonderful fount is given the name spirit, then in meeting your spirit you always find more of yourself.
The overall action of inner-directed movement is toward greater freedom from bonds; toward liberation from the monsters of self doubt, dependence on a partner or a social role, or guilt and rigid rules and beliefs. It opens you to the transforming influence of the spirit as defined above. It allows you to be touched by a power to heal sickness. If anything, this freedom, this move toward independence, this healing, is the real spiritual jewel to be found as your being liberates itself.
The movements you allow and the energy of your life – life itself – that express through those movements all reveal your innate freedom. There is no goal in this practice, and that in itself is a freedom. The moment your body gives expression to its own needs, you have cast off one of the great bonds – social pressure to conform. There is level after level of freedom beyond that, each with its own reward and difficulty. For freedom has responsibility, and it means losing chains that may have become precious in some way. The loss of beliefs previously cherished; the falling away of opinions that gave strength of purpose; the removal of walls of defence against meeting people and your own fuller experience, all have to be met and adjusted to. There is a way of experiencing life which only unveils itself to you if you dare to unrobe your mind and heart; if you chance the adventure of freedom from your own fears, and if your only reward sought is that of liberation from your self imposed limitations.
Daring To Live Your Best
Two years ago I watched a young man leave college showing obvious signs of anxiety about his own abilities. His offhandedness about authority also suggested he feared from the outset he would not meet helpfulness from any organisation. Despite having many gifts, and being highly intelligent and imaginative he nevertheless suffered a great deal of despondency about himself and how inadequate he felt. The world around him appeared to cause a degree of anxiety that paralysed him.
During my attempt to understand what held him back and what his possibilities were my intuition presented me with the image of a young bird on the verge of leaving the nest. What struck me when I considered the idea was that the bird had in fact never flown before. It had no experience of flying. There was no way of practising before it took that amazing leap into the literal unknown. It could not stand on the ground and run around flapping its wings taking little jumps until it could leap further and further through the air.
The small, unskilled, inexperienced bird takes the leap, dares death, opens its wings and flies – because a greater older bird, a wiser experienced creature stands within the small one. Perhaps you would give it the name instinct. Whatever you call it the unequipped immature bird, by its very leap, calls upon the experience of flight lying dormant in itself. The Great Bird, the ancient experience, would never come to the small juvenile bird if it had not made the leap. If you don’t take to the air you will never learn to fly. If you never plunge in the water you will never learn to swim.
In humans this wiser, more experienced self is our dormant potential. Dr. Clair King accepted the reality of this potential when he was confronted by a child with an injured eye. Five year old Robert Kasner was taken to him for an emergency eye operation. His cornea had been slashed by a piece of flying glass, allowing the liquid in the eye to drain out. The operation was performed at Aultman Hospital, and a flap of conjunctiva pulled to patch the wound. After twelve days the dressing was removed, only to reveal that the patch had not held. The iris was protruding again. Robert needed another operation. An appointment was made for three days later.
When Dr. King examined Robert prior to the operation after three days he could not believe what he saw. The eye was completely healed. He was astonished, even embarrassed. On asking the parents how this was possible, they told him simply that, “We took Robert to a Kathryn Kuhlman service. Prayers were offered for his healing.” (Kathryn Kuhlman’s book God Can Do It Again, published by Oliphants.) Dr. King Later joined the Order of St. Luke the Physician.
You have the power to access healing changes. You have a reservoir of potential from which you bring treasures to your everyday life. If you are ill, there is the possibility of reaching into this unconscious storehouse and finding healing change. If you are empty of pleasure you can be filled. If you are dead inside, you can come to life. I know that even if you do not trust enough to let-go fully and find a fast miracle, you can certainly allow a slow miracle to take place.
Using Your Intuition
The unconscious often reveals intuitive knowledge. The relationship between the young, inexperienced bird and the Great Bird that informs it can certainly be thought of as intuitive. The word ‘intuition’ is defined as knowledge not gained by reasoning and intelligence. It can also be seen as the gaining of information or perception without the use of the senses. Information has not been received from an objective source. We each have enormous powers of intuition if we accept the above definitions. Much of the learning of language is intuitive, in that we did not reason about, we were not informed, what the rules were.
Intuition is not a function one often hears acclaimed in the work-a-day world as a practical and useful ability. Perhaps if you are in a life situation or work which is routine and unchallenging, then intuition may have no real use for you. But if you are involved in the uncertainties of life and work; if you are faced by previously unmet situations with your relationships, your children, your projects, you need every resource you can access to bring to the creative act of living.
Betty describes an experience of this everyday side of intuition.
“Daniel, my son, was in the middle of studying for his ‘A’ levels and was facing a lot of uncertainty. The amount of effort and commitment needed was very great, but also he was having to make decisions about what direction to take in his studies that he realised would influence the rest of his life. He kept asking himself and me whether he was making the right decisions. We had talked around the subject a lot, exploring the various possibilities. So it wasn’t that we hadn’t given time and thought to the subject that was maintaining the question for Daniel.
One evening we were sitting in his bedroom and again the question arose. I said to him, ‘Look, we’ve talked over this lots, and going over the same things again aren’t going to give us anything new. I would like to talk to you from another part of myself just to see if it is any more helpful. Daniel knew I used inner-directed movement, and I explained to him that I had found it often gave me unexpected and useful new views of things – did he want to hear what might arise from that source? He said he did.
I had discovered that if I gave myself permission to be moved from within, words and images poured up into consciousness without me having to think about them. So I sat with my eyes closed in this way and asked the question of what would be the most useful direction for Daniel. Within moments I started speaking – and you have to understand that I didn’t know what I was going to come out, so I felt some tension as to what I might say to Dan; would it be stupid or banal? What I said was something like this. ‘There is a story about a young man. He was setting out on a journey by himself. He hoped to reach a town some miles away. He had only walked a few miles when he came across a fork in the road. He hadn’t realised when he had started that he might not know the way. He knew where he wanted to get, but he didn’t know now which road would be the right one. There were no signposts to say, and he must decide without help. He stood there a long time struggling with the problem. But try as he might, he could find no clues as to which road would lead him to the town. If he took the wrong one he might go so far from his destination much time would be lost. So he was unable to move. What he didn’t know was that it didn’t matter what road he took. Further on the two roads linked again so both led to his destination’.
I was amazed that I could make up a story about Dan’s situation without any conscious effort at all. But also, that I could so unhesitatingly tell him the story. The important thing for me was the effect hearing it had on him. It appeared to bring alive a truth he already knew in himself. The change was very quick. He never needed to talk about choices again. That was some years back, and he still talks about decisions in a way telling me the story is now a part of the way he thinks.”
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Let your time of inner-directed movement be an opening to the wisdom you have within yourself. Do not limit yourself. You, nor anyone else yet know what the limits are of human ability and experience. There is nothing in this practice apart from the discover of who and what you are. If you live in doubts or limited views about yourself that may seem little to gain. Those who have made the journey encourage you to open to the discovery of the many dimensions of yourself still left to find. Becoming yourself in fullness is the greatest adventure left in the world.
[1] – The article was called Rituals Of Beauty – Awake In A Dream. Harper’s & Queen, September 1984.
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SUBTITLE – Movements That Awaken Your Inner Self
BLURB – AUTHOR DETAILS
Most physical movements, and particularly those we perform to keep fit – tend to be disconnected from the psyche. By contrast, LIBERATING THE BODY describes a form of movement which arises spontaneously in response to ones own unique needs, allowing free expression of one’s innermost self and releasing subtle emotions and intuitions.
In one of the most innovative and original approaches to wholeness and health ever published, Tony Crisp describes this unique process, its astounding potential, and its links with ancient traditions.
By liberating your body you can liberate the mind. This book opens up the way to lasting health, joy and vitality.
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Tony Crisp is an international author and teacher who has been researching natural health and the body-mind connection for 30 years. He is also a dream therapist/consultant for LBC, and has written regular features on dreams for THE MAIL, SHE and other magazines. He is author of several books on dreams and related subjects, including DREAM DICTIONARY (Macdonald 1990, and by: USA – Dell; Sweden – Viva; Japan – Dobutsu Sha; Holland – Spectrum) and MIND AND MOVEMENT (Daniel 1987).
LEARN EXERCISES that allow your innate spontaneity to express as physical movements which tone your body, release tensions, and stimulate overall health.
LET THE NATURAL WISDOM IN YOU communicate through subtle feelings and body impulses. This balanced interaction between the facets of your being, never manage by most exercise systems, is a remarkable feature of Liberating the Body.
YOUR UNBELIEVABLE CREATIVITY is locked in the unconscious processes of your own body and mind. By liberating your body you can liberate your mind and discover the treasures of your own experience.
Here is a whole rich new area to experience. Fritjof Capra has said that in today’s world, “Retreating into our minds, we have forgotten how to ‘think’ with our bodies, how to use them as agents of knowing.” Crisp explains how to “think” with your body. Here is a way to let your body and emotions discover their liberated joyousness and splendid creative exuberance and health. Like the practitioners mentioned in this book, if you liberate your body, for the first time in your life you might realise you are vitally alive, and know you are more than you ever previously believed yourself to be.
The result is a growing sense of wholeness and joy. The natural regulating process of your being always attempts to promote a balanced expression and growth not only of your body, but also of your sexuality, emotions and mind.
Link to Chapter List
Compensation Theory of Dreaming
Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is linked with homeostasis or self-regulation – the sort of self-regulation indicated in the observations of MacKenzie, means that the process underlying dream production helps keep psychological balance, just as homeostasis keeps body functions balanced by producing perspiration when hot, shivering when cold, and the almost miraculous minutiae of internal changes. Despite self-regulation or homeostasis being an obvious and fundamental process in the body, in nature and the cosmos as a whole, it still appears difficult for many people investigating the mind to accept a similar function psychologically. See: biological dream theory;computers and dreams; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; science sleep and dreams; sleep walking; LifeStream; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Opening to Life
All our lives we try to achieve a balance of the contradictory opposites within us, and whether in our egos we succeed or fail, every function claimed by the ego is balanced by its opposite in the subconscious. Only in the fusion of infancy, or of sexual orgasm, or in religious ecstasy do we escape the psychic wound of division.
Put bluntly, dreams are said to compensate for conscious attitudes and personality traits. So the coldly intellectual man would have dreams expressive of feelings and the irrational as part of a compensatory process. The ascetic might dream of sensuous pleasures, and the lonely unloved child dream of affection and comfort. But this is only the most basic aspect of compensation and is demonstrated in the example below.
Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force; though an individual may be overwhelmed by their life experience, some part of one’s mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life. This may disappear for brief periods, when the fears or pain occurs, but for most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. Lawrence Lessing, in a Fortune article on recent sleep research, has written: ‘At the same time recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’
Example: In his book Psychology in Service of The Soul, Leslie Weatherhead tells the story of a little girl who while on a visit to a zoo was given a coin to get a small chocolate bar from a vending machine. She eagerly asked for more coins to obtain all the bars in the machine. The mother refused. The next morning the girl said she dreamt her mother had come into her bedroom and thrown a lot of chocolate bars under her bed.
Jung’s view of compensation was far more inclusive however. He quotes, as an example the dream of an elderly general he met while sitting opposite him on a train journey. The general told Jung that he had dreamt he was on parade with younger officers while being inspected by the commander in chief. On reaching the general the commander asked him to define beauty. This surprised the general as he expected to be asked technical questions regarding his service. He was embarrassed and could not give a clear answer. The commander in chief then asked a young major the same question and received a clearer answer. The general experienced feelings of failure and his grief woke him. Jung’s questioning led the general to realise that the young major who successfully answered the query about beauty actually looked just like himself when he was that age and a major. Further questioning led to the information that at that age the general had been interested in art, but the pressure of work and the rigidity of the military life had eroded the interest. Jung goes on to suggest that the dream in his late life was helping to compensate for the one sided development necessitated by his army career. The dream in fact reminded the general of this neglected side of himself.
This concept of wholeness, linked with the Self, which such compensatory dreams connect with is best seen in the collection of many years dreams by an individual undertaking their own personal journey to self acceptance and integration. Through an overview of dreams gained in this way, the two aspects of compensation become much more clearly drawn. The dream work, aimed at meeting the neglected or hurt parts of oneself, opens the way to more pronounced compensation. A man who was investigating a feeling of lack in regard to his marriage, gives the following account.
Example: As I was exploring my feeling I suddenly began to change direction and realised that from the very earliest period of my life I had certain filters in place that influenced incoming sensory information. This had come about because I noticed how critical I was of our next-door – upstairs – neighbours, and in examining it saw that I had filters to search all information for danger. This burst open in intense feelings and awareness of being a ‘weak chick’. A powerful internal struggle and something like an ‘oh God no!’ feeling accompanied it. I then experienced what it was like to be a premature baby and so weak. Being born two months prematurely had thrown my infant self into a high state of anxious survival where everything was felt as a potential danger. So my filters were examining everything for danger. Everything that moved or made a noise was a potential threat to my existence.
At first with laughter, then with pain I saw that this had made me suspicious of my own mother. I had not fitted the ‘norm’ in terms of size, strength or behaviour, so not only had I lived with a ‘danger alert’ process going all the time, but also with the realisation I was not up to scratch. Instead of the full term child who is more adjusted to the environment I had emerged still in a condition adjusted to the womb. My psychological state was also, I felt, quite different, a sort of experience of the death world, the world before birth and after death.
Society, I felt, has a sort of labelling or measuring system. It has emerged out of biological criteria of survival and fitness, and is largely unconscious. People haven’t even acknowledged they are acting under such drives. ‘My genes are best, and everybody else’s are abnormal. But only the best of mine are going to get through’. Out of this I sensed that mothers who have children who are not ‘the best’ suffer a great internal struggle about their child. Part of them cries out, ‘That is no child of mine!’
So the people who are not seen as ‘fit’ are not given social rewards, starting with such rewards as recognition and warmth from ones own parents, and escalating from there into recognition and rewards from social groups and organisations. I personally felt as if I were not seen as fit for several reasons. My premature birth led me to be slightly less robust, and also my mixed cultural background during a time of war made me less fit. I didn’t have the right label attached. Christy D.
As can be seen, Christy feels himself much less capable and accepted by his mother than someone who has had a normal birth. He feels his premature birth left him always paces behind those born full term. He sums this up by saying:
Example: Due to constantly searching for something I had lost too soon – the security of my mother’s womb – due to feeling I never bonded with my mother, I had felt agonised most of my life that I couldn’t be an ordinary husband emotionally and sexually. I pushed and pushed to see if I could grow to this ordinariness and finally felt that I had arrived, only to find that I was too late. Not only had my wife entered the menopause and lost interest in a sexual relationship, but also my children had grown up and I had lost the huge satisfaction of being with them as youngsters. So here I am in my late fifties without a sexual relationship and without the loving contact of youngsters.
The gaps in Christy’s life are obvious, and the urge or need to compensate is also plain to see. In fact Christy has an experience that he describes as follows:
Example: I realised that because I had always felt inadequate in a certain degree, I had used religion as a means of compensation. Suddenly I saw the need for hero figures to use for compensatory purposes for individuals and groups. The person may not be able to live out some aspect of their life. They may not get a sexual partner; they may not get recognition in their work; perhaps people treat them as of no account. For some people an actual physical disability stops them from living out their life fully. The hero/ine figure is then used as an image that has several functions.
For instance nuns in a convent will not live out their ability to get married or have a child. The figure of Christ is used as a compensatory symbol for this in that they marry Christ and their passion is through meditation on his being. In this way people use a hero/ine figure to compensate for what is missing in their own life. They can live their unlived soul through the passion of Christ for instance.
The figure such as Christ represents our own wholeness and complete potential. To compensate for our own unlived areas we look to this figure and have a taste of what we are not expressing outwardly through identifying with the hero/ine. Meditations on the figure might produce great feelings of love, pain, wonder, and recognition – in fact whatever is missing in everyday relationships. The Christian festivals appear to be a way of living out via the image of Christ the passions of life that we might not meet in our everyday life. The birth, the struggle, the love, the death, can all be partaken of. We can share the passionate experience of living in this way, even though in our own actual life we might not be able to live such a passionate and eventful existence. And I suppose television does this for many people today.
At first I had a strong feeling this sort of compensation was used by people who are inadequate in some way, a path for the weak, and a path that I had taken myself. This suggested by inference that I was less capable of living a full life than most. I had a sneering feeling about how people use this as a crutch, but then realised I was judging once more. ‘I need a kick in the arse. I’ve got an ability to see, but I put all these judgements on things.’
As I looked at the situation more fully though I saw that in fact nobody lives a complete life. No one is completely whole, expressing every aspect of their potential. So in fact we all relate in some way to the Christ or other such figures who represents, or in some way ARE the total potential of human existence; a mighty example of what human life can achieve.
Now I came face to face with Christ. I felt knocked over emotionally by it. It was an experience of meeting the most amazing creature or being one could imagine. I stood in front of a god, something that totally transcended human existence. Gods are often depicted as having some great power of destruction or creativity. They might be like a human being magnified many times, with loves and hates, huge powers, throwing lightning bolts and so on. My experience didn’t show Christ as anything like this. The transcendence was in the manner of Christ’s consciousness. Here was a being with no real power in a worldly sense. This being hadn’t created the world and couldn’t influence world history through power.
The consciousness, the being of Christ, existed by a form of love so magnificent I could barely look upon it. If love is the right word, this love penetrated every living thing and absorbed their most intimate life experience. The Christ took in every aspect of existence without any judgement whatsoever. This was its life and sustenance. So one could say this wondrous creature was a sort of parasite living off the energy of life forms. But this is only a part of what I experienced. Through total acceptance it took in all. It took every tiny memory of each individual. But in return, if we can share its immense passion it offers us its own life that compared with our own is eternal.
I experienced that not only does one inherit the gift of eternal life through identification with Christ, but also we share the awareness of all life forms. Through this we participate in the life and passion of all beings present and past. As I met this I was on my knees as it were because I couldn’t help loving this wondrous being. I couldn’t help feeling my own smallness. I wanted to lose myself in this being and be washed through by its radiance and hugeness. To be in its presence was the most amazing thing. If you can imagine standing before a cosmic being that had arrived from some other galaxy, and was millions of years old, perhaps ageless, had no physical form except our own teeming lives, radiated love so much that you were engulfed in it, and simply by being in its presence shared its magnificent awareness, this might give some idea. Christy D.
Christy acknowledges his own need for compensation due to feelings of inadequacy. But he goes beyond this to see that each of us are in some measure incomplete and compensation in its largest sense is about finding awareness of the wholeness underlying our own life.
The description of compensation above is an example of something functional. To be able to survive crushing life experience is a real achievement, not an imagined one, and is therefore functional. Using an image to evoke hope and motivation doesn’t make it less of an achievement. The process of compensation also links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of humanity and can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or saviour.
To be clear about this, the power that is found is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the compenstaory image is a graphic presentation of our own innate potential. This emerges from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as do dreams. It can also be evoked by using such images in a compensatory way.
See: – LifeStream; biological dream theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Introduction to Dreams
The Archetype of the Hero-ine
Archetype of the hero/ine – The archetype of the hero/ine has fascinated, taught, even ennobled human beings for thousands of years. It appears as Hercules; Ulysses; Christ; Athena; Krishna; St. Theresa; Mohammed; Mary; Phyllis Wheatley; Boadicea; Superman; Florence Nightingale; a great game hunter; Joan of Arc; Anastasia from Brazil; or any Big Man in your dreams or films, or TV hero such as Captain Kirk or Dr Who.
We are the hero/ine of our own life. We brave great dangers, face monsters, pass through difficult initiations. Fundamental to the whole drama of the hero/ine is the evolution of our own identity from the depths of unconsciousness in the physical process of conception, through to developing self awareness as an adult. From the great ocean of collective culture, language and society we struggle toward the emergence of ourselves as a mature individual. To do this we face death and rebirth several times when we metamorphose from baby to child; from child to adolescent; from adolescent to adult; from adult with youthful body to ageing body. It is such an incredible journey, so heroic, so impossible of achievement, so fraught with dangers and triumphs. It is the greatest story in the world, and each of us live it. Perhaps some of us fall on the way, or get lost in the intricacies and challenges, dangers and pleasures of a certain part of the journey, as stories like the odyssey portray.
We find the story told over and over symbolically in all the ‘holy’ books as the birth of the divine child; the journey of the hero/ine through dangers and trials; the creation of the world – our personal awareness; the birth and life of Moses. All these stories pertain to the difficulties we face and means we use to BE. They are about the art of keeping balance amidst the multitude of forces acting on our human psyche and our body. The hero/ine is the one who dares even though they feel afraid and in pain, who makes the journey despite being encumbered by the chains and parasitic creatures of childhood trauma, of habitual and instinctive fears, of cultural ignorance.
In this journey, the avoidance of fear and pain in our society, where chemical anodynes or tranquillisers are sought to remove any tiny discomfort, is a great tragedy. Not that we need to become masochists, but we miss our own wholeness through fear of our own power to experience deeply, and be enriched by the immensity of our own genesis and history. In other cultures, the ability to meet pain and fear were considered spiritual strengths. They still are. The following example shows one person meeting the sort of fears and uncertainties, the despair and shadows we all face in our journey. It is typical of the journey undertaken by the hero/ine.
As I looked at my present situation, as I was wondering how to come to terms with being a second-class sort of person in a second-class life situation. I started thinking about all the potential and mental possibilities I have touched in the past. How could it be that I had come through so many things, grown beyond myself in so many ways, and yet at the moment I am locked in this apparent decay and decline? Has all the past been an illusion? Have I declined so much that all the power and wonder of my previous life is now lost to me?
Having asked this question I had an insight that I had got into a negative feedback loop. Because I had got stuck in this place, then I feared I was stuck in this place, which produced the certainty I was stuck, which produced the inability to move out. I was feeding back to myself images of failure and feelings of unattractiveness, and all the other negative feelings we all meet during the week. Instead of looking at them and seeing them as passing feelings, I was taking them as impressions of reality and drowning in them. I was accepting them as true and starting to live them. That then confirmed the negatives – and so it goes on.
I tried to find the way out of the loop. The only way out I could find was the realisation that the loop has no end. There is only one thing to do – stop it playing. Grab it and stop the crazy record. To help with this, to help grab the thing and kill it, I obviously would have to realise it as untrue. If I still believe the loop to be playing a truth, then I only strengthen the action. So for its cessation I need to realise that my sense of self is a constantly moving fragile thing that has no stable reality. I am not ANY ONE THING – so how can I be a failure, or a success, or great, or of no account, or any thought or feeling? No one thought or feeling can represent my reality. No feeling, or sense of myself, is anything more than a sense, a feeling, it is not ME. So how could this feeling represent some sort of permanent personal reality?
Although the struggle described above is subtle, it is nevertheless one that takes strength, resources and determination to meet and overcome. Those are the qualities necessary for the heroic experience of life. Those are the qualities we each have at out core, otherwise we would not exist today. As the sperm and ovum you were the great hero/ine of the enormous journey leading to birth. Millions died in the attempt, but you were the winner. You are the survivor of ten million generations of ancestors, struggling, developing new strategies, on the heroic journey from the earliest mammals to your life today.
Jung felt that the hero/ine myth dates to pre-history. To understand this, we must remember that ancient people thought in a much more pictorial way than perhaps we do today. Inner feelings such as fear and sexuality, drives which might push toward actions that were outside of the tribal taboos, were often depicted as spirits or demons. Even today many people use the image of the Devil to depict personal urges that are socially forbidden or repressed for one reason or another. In such ancient communities, everything was public because there were no massive prisons, or hospitals, or homes for the elderly to hide the unfortunate side of life. So primitive people intimately knew what madness and death looked like. They knew what disease did to the body. They could see what happened when a community turned against an individual and stoned, speared or strangled them.
Therefore, to witness an individual stand against a taboo, to walk calmly into death, to be unafraid in the midst of the demon of illness – such people left enormous impressions on those who witnessed it. It showed in the most graphic way that one could live without fear; one could meet death – perhaps even resurrect, either from a serious and incapacitating depression, or as would occasionally be seen, a person arise again from the apparent death of catalepsy or a near death experience. The people who were seen to emerge in those ways were hero/ines.
The hero/ine depicts our own powers of transformation, of courage, of problem solving and the ability to meet and pass through the tribulations of our life. We meet and emerge from self-doubt. We vanquish anger and lovelessness. We discover hope and motivation in the midst of despair and feelings of pointlessness. These monsters, or dragons, these demons that can rob us of the will to live; these dark creatures of our own mind that can literally lead to illness or suicide, the hero/ine meets and conquers. Underneath all these qualities another fact is demonstrated by the hero/ine, either in the external world or in dreams. It is that at the core of our being is an incredible potential that can be drawn upon. The hero-ine demonstrates this. But of course we may simple explain it away by saying the hero-ine was born different, or with greater strength or divinity. This is what Christianity does to the figure of Christ. It therefore takes away the responsibility that might otherwise cause us to wonder why we are not claiming our own potential. For at the core of each of us is the miracle of life itself; and at the core of life stands a sparkling ever shifting mystery.
One of the important factors of the hero/ine image is that although basically the hero/ine is shown to have had a humble birth, and be an ordinary person, they draw upon strengths and have guardian figures or teachers that others do not make use of. Joseph L. Henderson, writing on Ancient Myths and Modern Man in Man and His Symbols, points out that Perseus had Athena; Theseus had Poseidon. This, Henderson points out, represents the wholeness of oneself (ones potential) from which we can draw strength – the conscious personality that we identify as ourselves, expressing as it does only a tiny part of the totality of our possibilities and experience.
This tutelary figure is one of the ways the unconscious depicts the unbelievably rich and unimaginably immense cultural information we have absorbed, along with the innate potential arising from the process of life that carries us miraculously through conception and life in the womb.
There are very real hero/ines who daily enrich our life – Edison with the electric light bulb; Florence Nightingale with her concept of nursing. All of these figures stand over us and are part of our unconscious experience here in our daily life. Because our unconscious tends to portray a function – in this case the synthesis of immense information – as an image or character, the guardian or god figure well expresses the enormity of our unconscious knowledge. See: the sixth and seventh paragraphs under religion and dreams.
Part of the journey of the hero is to find the Golden Fleece, to escape from the belly of the whale, to face the sirens, to confront the Minotaur. All these are representative of real everyday situations that some or all of us are facing now. Particularly they depict the journey from identifying oneself as the ego and body, to finding the real core of who and what we are. This core lies at the deepest level of the unconscious. This is not because it is hidden or buried, but because it is so much a part of everything, so exposed, that only a form of inaction or letting go can reveal it. This is why the story of the pearl of great price is told of it. But between the conscious personality and the Core lie real creatures of fear and pain – our childhood traumas and fears; our cultural and social fears and ignorance; our personal, family and national prejudices, angers and karma. Each night in sleep we drop to our core. But likewise we all fall into the underworld of sleep like the Sleeping Beauty and meet these shadows we have not dared face – the dweller of the threshold. This is why so many people cannot sleep, and must drug themselves. Far better the stance of the daring hero-ine, who dares to face them and find the holy grail of deep peace and connection with their own timeless self. See: guardian of the threshold.
Jung makes a point of saying that if we identify in any way with the hero/ine archetype, we must be careful of the possibility of exaggerated pride – hubris – that sometimes comes with it. Such pride can lead to unrealistic self evaluation and the attempts to accomplish impossible dreams. He mentions a man who felt himself capable almost of flying, and who eventually fell from a mountain. Jung intimates that the man may have in fact stepped into space out of his hubris. The aim is to access your potential while still recognising your personal smallness in the scheme of things.
Lastly, the death of the hero/ine is often an important part of the theme the unconscious portrays in this symbol. One of the main features of the hero/ine is the way they lead us into greater self expression, fuller maturity. But once the maturity is reached, once the new is attained, then one needs to drop the means of achievement and live the new life. The journey to a new land may require attitudes and activities which when we get there are no longer needed. The farmers who travelled West in America needed to drop their nomadic life once they had arrived. See: Archetype of death; Archetype of rebirth; individuation.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Can I recognise that the life process in me is heroic in its constant facing of life’s challenges?
Can I as a person live some of this heroism in my daily life and relationships?
What are the life challenges, inwardly and outwardly, that I face? Can I define them and look at my strategy to deal with them?
Dare I explore a new way of being by using Arm Circling Meditation.
Archetype of Christ
Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, as a human experience he depicts powerful influences acting upon your personality. For a start, Christianity is a huge social and political force in the world. Many of us as children are educated to accept its beliefs or we meet its influence in one way or another. Therefore Christ in our dreams often depicts this enormous influence and how we relate to it – the influence can be many sided, from a recognition of the best in oneself to the hatred and anger about what organised Christianity has done to many.
Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, Christ is never that – even though pictures and paintings depict Christ as a human being. That is because we have been taught that Jesus and Christ are the same person. But it clearly says that when Jesus was baptised something immense happened to him. “Now when all the people were baptised, it came to pass, that Jesus also was baptised – of John in Jordan – and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son: in thee I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:21-22).”
It tells us that the heavens opened and something from the cosmos entered Jesus and transformed him into having Christ Consciousness. For Christ was an aspect of Godness and had always existed. It is easier to see it rather like our growth. When we were babies we grew and entered another level of awareness and ability called childhood. Later another huge change entered us and we became adolescents – again with a different mental and emotional state.
Many people have attained the change of Christ consciousness. It is a further stage of human growth. As an example Siddartha became the Buddha when he experienced such a great change. In different languages this change has different names such as Krishna Consciousness. It might shock some people to see Christ linked with Buddha and Krishna – if so you have a lot of growing to do and if you do you too can enter Christ consciousness.
Like any of the world’s great religious figures, Christ can also be a very potent compensatory symbol. Each of us have feeling responses to events. Some events lead to a pleasurable response, others to a painful response. As children, and often as adults, we are largely at the mercy of events as to whether our life is experienced as painful or pleasurable. But there is also a way of creating our own response that a few of us use consciously. If we are lonely or depressed for instance, we may read a book, go out with a friend or watch a film, stimulating feelings that displace the loneliness or despair. This ability to produce positive or different feelings is often seen in the dream process. By holding in mind an image connected with hope and love, feelings will be produced that will compensate in some measure for pain or depression we may be feeling.
But Christ is used to compensate for what may be felt as crushing or defeating life circumstances or inner despair. Such compensation may also be used to deal with things missing from ones life, such as a sexual partner or social achievement.
However, being able to achieve Christ Consciousness, or Buddha Consciousness, or even Krishna Consciousness, is much more that a compensation, it is a transformation of ones life from one in which misery is often a part to one of which is symbolised in the New Testament as walking on water. If we take it out of its symbolism it tells us that our emotions that can be stormy and difficult to deal with can be dealt with and even tamed by the immense power we hold within us, which most of us have lost contact with. I am talking about a huge force that can be contacted or allowed into ones life. Without it we are often powerless to deal with negative feelings, and so many people take the path of suicide. But with it we can meet them easily, walking over the surface of such stormy emotions.
The fundamental power of Christ as an archetypal force lies in a that direction however. As an archetype Christ enters our life with powers of redemption, of transformation, as an aid to lead us out of awful life situations, and a type of love transcending the human limitations of jealousy and dependence.
It it is a universal consciousness which is a part of every person, whatever their beliefs. To become aware of it we must somehow have broken our heart and self so be aware of such a huge awareness. See Ages of Love.
Example: It is difficult to convey the immediacy of these experiences deep in the sleep state. Over and over I experienced fantasies, the drama, of being a sacrifice. As one who expressed the new ideas, the new consciousness, I was beaten and smashed to death because I was a threat to the old instinctive order. But the fragments of my strewn body, my flesh, were eaten by those who had killed me. And my flesh was like Seeds that grew within those who devoured, and became in them the new awareness they had sought to destroy. In another of the series I was a willing sacrifice. Through the stress and ritual of being willingly lead to death, I would receive the new consciousness and in some way bring it to my people.
I am going through masses of evolutionary feelings. The struggle to develop self-consciousness, and how the Messiah was first of all a fantasy, then an embodiment of this by individuals. Then how other people lived certain aspects of it, and were taken to be the Messiah, the Krishna, whatever. They did bring into the body another type of awareness, that mankind had been struggling toward for so long. This is where the mystery of the birth of Christ comes from. Why there is no real historical person. Why there is so much myth and legends surrounding such events. It is the embodiment of something mankind needed so much, to help them out of their crisis into the next revolutionary level.
Often overlooked in this influence is the power to look at oneself and life very clearly, very honestly, without hiding behind excuses or self deceptions. Perhaps more than anything else though, Christ is a cultural image depicting the power of our own highest possibilities. It is the outreach to us of collective human love.
Christ is not the only historical figure with these associations. Krishna and Shiva in the Indian culture, Mohammed in Islamic culture, Odin in the Viking age, and Quetzalcoatl/ Kukulkán/ Gukumatz in the South American culture have the same sort of power. Some aspects of the Buddha are approached for redemption and there are many saviour heroes from other cultures such as Anansi in Africa, Cúchulainn in Eire, Osiris in Egypt and Hercules in Greece. Apollonius of Tyana is also recorded as living a sacred life. But Christianity is simply a new expression of an ancient theme.
Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. He was born of a Virgin. He travelled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men. His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples (the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings. He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers.
Osiris was born on the 361st day of the year, say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great traveller. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and “tamed them by music and gentleness, not by force of arms”; he was the discoverer of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness, and slain and dismembered. “This happened,”says Plutarch, “on the 17th of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion” (the sign of the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin was brought out before the worshippers and saluted with glad cries of “Osiris is risen.” “His sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos.” Quoted from Pagan and Christain Creeds by Edward Carpenter
“Such a myth, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
I know I hung on the wind-swept tree Nine nights through, Pierced by a spear, dedicated to Odin, I myself to myself.
There is, above all, the self-sacrifice of the hero-saviour: as Toynbee puts it in A Study of History, ‘A very god who dies for different worlds under diverse names-for a Minoan World as Zagreus, for a Sumeric World as Tammuz, for a Hittite World as Attis, for a Scandinavian World as Balder, for a Syriac World as Adonis (“Our Lord”), for an Egyptian World as Osiris, for a Shi’i World as Husayn, for a Christian World as Christ.’
Depending upon the culture we were raised in, we will unconsciously put an image to the power of change and transformation that we experience. People in all ages, all cultures and all social circumstances have experienced what is often felt to be a divine influence touching them in some way.
I believe through observation that such long held and powerful traditional beliefs are based on something functional. The description of compensation above is an example of this. To be able to survive crushing life experience is a real achievement, not an imagined one, and is therefore functional. Using an image to evoke hope and motivation doesn’t make it less of an achievement. But the archetype links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of us and can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or saviour.
To be clear about this, the power that is found is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the image of Christ is a graphic presentation of our own innate wonder. The patterns of love and strength mentioned above, and other behaviours lived by past individuals that remain in collective memory, offer keys or clues as to how to release this innate potential. That such keys, as well as ones innate potential, are often clothed in symbols and traditional imagery, is simply because we have not made such parts of our potential or heritage clearly conscious. They thus emerge from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow. See The Inner Path of Christ.
So what does the archetype of Christ the Redeemer and Good Shepherd mean in this sense?
To understand this we must first remember that our ego, the sense that we have of being a distinct person, is not one and the same thing as our body’s biological processes, or of our deep psychological processes. We all have some understanding of this because we can observe in ourselves or in others, that we – our personality – may want something that is very much against what our body wants. People with eating disorders for instance may actually die from malnutrition. People who have a fear of sex may constantly fight or repress their sexual urge. A person is often at odds with the natural processes and urges that underlie their conscious ego.
Norman MacKenzie explains this very well in his book . Dreams and Dreaming. Writing about the clinical use of LSD to help patients deal with various forms of neurosis, he says that the drug enabled a massive observation of how people’s mind worked, and how people related to their unconscious drives. When a patient first took LSD one of the commonest reactions was massive anxiety. This degree of anxiety usually arises only when we are threatened physically or mentally. The patient fears the drug is robbing them of control and will overwhelm them. In fact what is happening is that the repressive defences the person uses to keep their inner drives and processes under control are being relaxed. See The Two Powers Explained.
People relate to this threat in two major ways. They either fight to keep control, and employ all manner of techniques such as keeping their attention focused outwardly by such things as talking, walking about, drawing, holding their breath or dancing – or they surrender to what is being experienced. To meet the parts of ones nature that have previously been pushed into unconsciousness, one needs to surrender in some degree. If the person fights the loss of control as the new material from within is emerging, it sometimes feels as if they are disintegrating. Their body may feel as if it is changing or dying, and they are losing themselves.
Below are two descriptions from people who used LSD therapeutically that illustrates these different responses.
It didn’t happen at first, but gradually I began to feel that if I relaxed I would not be able to hold back my emotions, that I would do something that would be seen as crazy. So I sat holding onto myself, literally tensing my muscles to hold back whatever might happen to me. Time seemed to stretch and I felt as if I would never get out of this tension and difficulty. I just had to sit through it, live through it, and hope there would be an end. I also wanted to get away, but I was frightened I would get lost, like I was a child of four or five. Maybe that’s how I felt at that age, so I had to stop myself from doing what I wanted to do. A.K.
Here is someone else’s description of a similar situation.
Early in the session I started having fantasies about being attacked. Each time it happened I put the fantasy aside because I couldn’t see why I would be having these feelings that I was being attacked. There were a lot of images flowing into my mind also about the horror of life in general – babies abused, children murdered, men and women shot or tortured. The fantasies returned and several men attacked me and were trying to drag me off somewhere against my will. As the fantasy progressed, or replayed, I began to realise that it only appeared like an attack because I was resisting the process. In fact the men wanted to show me something that was important to me. They were being quite gentle, but because of my resistance, it felt to me like an aggressive act. I then let myself be carried off by the men, and began to feel as if a great chunk of my nature has been held back since childhood because of anxiety. In fact I had been frightened to ‘live’ this part of me. I had held so much of myself back throughout most of my life that I constantly felt there was something I was missing and had to search for. But it wasn’t an external thing – it was the me I had denied. B.M.
AK was using tensions and experiencing fears he had developed in childhood to hold back feelings that he had been taught were not acceptable. In BM’s experience he learned to move beyond such tensions and fears.
In observing such struggles in thousands of people, the doctors and clinicians working with them saw that no matter what the patient was experiencing, even if they felt completely overwhelmed for a while and were lost in their fears and emotions, something within them was learning from the experience and attempting to integrate not only the insights gained, but also the various parts of their nature that were in conflict or split. Mackenzie says, ‘No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy – a kind of bridge between two types of mental process.’
Jung observed something similar in the psyche. He called it the Transforming Principle, or the self-regulating action, which constantly attempts psychic growth. He stated that one can watch this at work by noting many dreams from the same individual over a period of time. When one does this ‘tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. …… one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth-the process of individuation.’
Most religions call it the power of God at work in ones life, and many of them teach that if one surrenders to it, one will be healed and made whole. Different people and cultures represent or depict this transforming power within them in their own way. It is often represented as Christ, but equally as well as something more abstract. However, whatever we wish to name it, there is in us a potential that has in it more than we presently know of ourselves, and it has the power to heal and transform. It is observable that healing or therapy proceeds by a series of problem-solving movements. As soon as one difficulty is reviewed and removed, another appears, waiting in line to take its place.
In BM’s experience he learned to move beyond such tensions and fears. But also he says something that is at the heart of what this archetype brings. He says, “It wasn’t an external thing – It was the ‘me’ I had denied.”
That is the heart of the Christ archetype. It holds in it the you that may have been crushed, denied, traumatised, repressed, in some way held back from emerging as a reality in your life. It is the potential you hold within you that has not been allowed to flower. It is the very best of what you are, not some distant possibility that you have to get from outside yourself. See: life’s little secrets; compensation theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy;.
Here is another personal description. This time not from an LSD session, but from a man allowing the transforming action to take place while fully awake and without drugs. This makes clear what it is like to confront the power of transformation within.
In the previous week I had met a feeling I could not account for, which had left me wondering what was happening. I had the very strong impression that I had killed a man and now had the guilt of blood on my hands. This time in the group, when I surrendered, something I could never have suspected happened. I was standing with my eyes closed, but it seemed I could see, because the spontaneous mental imagery was so clear, that I was standing under a clear night sky, with the stars brilliant above. But there was a star more brilliant than the others that fell to Earth, and I knew it was something wonderful and special so hurried to see what it was. Others had also seen it, simple rural people like myself. What we found was a baby. But the wonder of it was so much I fell on my knees and couldn’t stop myself crying out again and again – A baby! A baby!
The tears and the cries were because I had the clear feeling or knowledge, a direct knowing, that all of the heavens, all of life’s mystery, had come to life in this baby. And to actually know this, to feel the impact of it, was almost more than I could bear. But part of the amazement was that this was every baby born. It wasn’t just one special baby. It was my own birth too! All the mystery of life was born in me. I sobbed with the pain and wonder of it.
Then the scene changed and I was standing by a dirt road. There were lots of people lining the road waiting. I didn’t know what for. Then excitement rose as a man came walking along the road toward us. He looked very ordinary to me. But as he got near he looked right at me and a huge feeling of love swept through me. I knew this man loved me in a way I had never been loved before. Then he walked directly to me and took hold of my hands and said, ‘You are my disciple’.
I stumbled backwards away from him. The love was too much, too painful. Looking into his eyes I knew I had been born with all that love, but I had killed it in myself. The blood on my hands was because I had murdered Him/myself. I had crushed the flower of my sexuality through fear. I had denied my own wonder and value in the world, looking to others for guidance. I had killed Christ in me – Christ who was the splendour of my own life and love if I dared to live it – my own birthright. But he had touched my hands, and I went to each of the people in the group and put my hands on them, trying to rub some of that magic onto them. Thomas.
As can be seen from Thomas’s description, the image of Christ holds in it not only the power of self-revelation for him, but also the relationship of teacher to disciple, and transforming love for one in need of wholeness. Thomas cannot help but think of Christ as separate from himself, even though at the same time he realises with deep emotion, that he is gazing at and being touched by his own wholeness, his own potential. See: compensation theory; the fundamental process.
This paradox needs to be remembered not only when meeting the Redeemer archetype, but almost any archetype. Also implicit in this meeting is the possibility that because confronting ones own wholeness and seeing ones own guilt, or the smallness of oneself, can lead to great personal transformation, it may lead the present personality, as it is at the moment, to dying and being left behind. Thus the meeting with Christ may include a personal experience of death and resurrection.
So the experience of meeting Christ may be a representation of the denied force of joyous life within – denied out of attempting to live social or religious rules and regulations, or social pressure to conform. Therefore, because ultimately we are an integral part of the universe, and have no existence outside of it, when we meet Christ/our wholeness and potential, we also become aware in some degree of the hugeness we are a part of or an expression of. We meet a sense of eternity, an awareness of the symbiotic – or cooperative processes or forces – operative in human life and the cosmos.
The Sunday School or Church Christ
This is another aspect of the Christ archetype and depicts social norms, the generally accepted morals and social rules. This ‘Christ’ comes about because the church tends to represent traditional values and national history, and attempts to press people to live these values. The dreamer may have a child-like relationship with this Christ, or if attempting to be self responsible, be in conflict with it. Some people find this Christ has a castrating role in their life, and flee in horror. In fact this aspect of social indoctrination may lead to such a burden of guilt and suppression that it can create psychic cripples. Trying to do all the ‘right’ things may lead us to the point where ‘we can’t say no to a glass of water without a pang of guilt.’
Two of the great forces that push at the human soul or psyche are, firstly, social pressure, such as the moral norm; and secondly, biological pressures such as the sex drive. Individuals may fight a lifelong battle with one or the other of these. The social criminal typifies battle with social authority pressures and rules; the ascetic and the bulimic battle with biological drives.
These two forces can be seen in the symbols of Christ and Mary Magdalene. The battle of these two immense forces is not really won until there is the marriage or unity between the two. The following dream and its exploration illustrate this dynamically.
I was in the basement of the house where I lived in London. I had taken some floorboards up because they were rotten. Underneath I saw a large white serpent or worm, somehow connected with a dead evil woman like a force of destruction and evil. I seemed to understand the evil could corrupt all of London, that it lived in a great underground lake that existed under all of London. I poked at the serpent with a piece of wood and it came to life and plunged into the earth. There seemed to be an air filled hole that I poked into and the wood I was using was wrenched away from my hands.
My family thought I was crazy because I was trying to tell them about this and sent for a doctor. I was very pleased to see him because he was very unbiased though, not believing – nor disbelieving. I explained my experience and feelings. With him there I dared to poke at the floor with a long scaffold pole. The pole was ripped from my grasp by some force below. Then we tied the pole to a beam and it ripped part of the beam off. I felt there was enough power to tear down my house if I had used it as an anchor. Then I saw Christ standing on my right, and the terrifying woman on my left, and they came together and the evil was neutralised – but so was the power of Christ. Mathew
Mathew saw the Christ figure as the moral norm in the society he was raised; a morality he had struggled with all his life. The woman he experienced as the urges such as his sexual needs, with which he had also struggled. When Christ and the woman merged he felt enormous peace.
The positive aspect of ‘Sunday School Christ’ is that prior to maturing enough to take realistic self and social responsibility, people need guidelines for behaviour. They often yearn for security or certainty. Religion in the form of powerful positive declarations of ‘truth’, supply this need for many people. For such people, making personal decisions in the face of the ever shifting external situations is enormously stressful. So organised and dogmatic religion is of great strength to them.
The Ideal Christ
This is yet another facet of this archetype, and is the psychological process which causes us not to take responsibility for our own highest ideals; our own yearnings for the good; our own most powerful urges arising against what we see as evils in the world. This influences us to wait for a sign from Christ or God in our dream or waking life in order to gain authority, or to overcome the anxiety associated with the urges. We want God to say we should act in a certain way because we are not willing to be self responsible. We deny in ourselves the core self and its divinity.
Example: ‘I stood outside a castle. It was closed and guarded by soldiers in armour. Wondering how to get in I thought that if I dressed and acted as a soldier I would be allowed entrance. It worked and inside Christ met me and said he had important work for me to do.’ Sonia.
The closely guarded secret is Sonia’s own impulses to do some sort of socially creative work. She doesn’t want to own them as her own. It is much easier if she can say ‘Christ told me to do this.’ In this way she avoids direct encounter with opposition and has a feeling that she has greater authority than her own. Joan of Arc might well be seen in this light.
The Healing Christ
The Christ archetype has powerful healing influence for many people.
Example: ‘A fierce battle was raging with bullets flying. I immediately fell down and ‘played dead’. It wasn’t that I was hurt in any way, but I didn’t want to be at any risk in the fight. As I lay there I saw a tall well built man in soldiers uniform walk to me. He gave no sign of any fear concerning the bullets, and quietly knelt beside me. I felt he was Christ, but was confused by him being a soldier. He placed a hand on my back and gradually worked his fingers under the shell of a large limpet type creature that I had never before known was parasitically attached to my back. I could feel him pull it away, but knew its tentacles still ran right into my chest. It seemed and alien had entered me. He then sat me up and told me how I could rid myself of the tentacles and so be healed.’ Peter Y.
Peter, whose dream this was, had a debilitating psychosomatic illness at the time of the dream, causing pain where the tentacles ran. The shell is his defences against feeling his own hurts and inner conflicts. The dream shows him contacting a strength which is not afraid of his internal battlefield or conflicts, and can show ways of healing real human problems. The healing rests upon the dreamer’s conscious action, not Christ’s, suggesting the dreamer taking responsibility for his own situation. Peter realised he had been avoiding his own internal battles, but felt he had found a strength – in the Big Man – which would support his efforts to find healing. In fact he met his conflicts and grew beyond his ailments.
Peter’s conflicts were between his love for his children and his love for another woman. The Christ he met was his own undammed life, the flood of loving sexuality, the strength to burst through social rules and regulations because love or life pushes. When we find it in ourselves we don’t give a hang about bullets, death, right or wrong, because we have a sense of our own integral existence within life, and our own rightness and place in eternity.
The Integral or Cosmic Christ
Each of us have, perhaps deep in their unconscious, a sense of connectedness with the whole, with the cosmos. Perhaps it is best to call this our own wholeness, which incorporates all the light and darkness in us, all the expressed and the potential. We may be little aware of this. We may be denying it sceptically as Lester is in the example below.
Example: ‘I am a journalist reporting on the return of Christ. He is expected on a paddle steamer going upstream on a large river. I am very sceptical and watch disciples and followers gather on the rear deck. The guru arrives, dressed in simple white robes. He has long, beautiful auburn hair and beard, and a gentle wise face. He begins to tap a simple rhythm on a tabla or Indian drum. It develops into complex intermingling of orchestral rhythms as everyone joins in. I now realise he is Christ, and feel overwhelmed with awe as I try to play my part in the music. I’m tapping with a pen and find myself fumbling. A bottle or can opener comes to me from the direction of Christ. I try to beat a complementary rhythm, a small part of a greater, universal music.’ Lester S.
Finding this inner connection with things can enrich all that we do in life, even if it is a very humble thing like Lester’s can opener. The awareness of connectedness and wholeness brings with it a realisation of taking part in the unimaginably grand drama of life. It gives a feeling, no matter what the state of our body, crippled or healthy, that we have something that makes any faults insignificant. It doesn’t take all the difficulties out of life, but it is a wonderful companion on the way. We come to know that at base we are a wonderful shining being, and that life and its circumstances and events, are a way in which we are learning to let that internal wonder shine out.
Another way of looking at this is by seeing Christ as a process. Christ might then be seen as a collective identity arising in the consciousness of humanity. This relates to us as individuals much as our identity relates to the cells of our body. Just as our identity survives the death of billions of cells in our lifetime, so the Christ consciousness survives our death and change, integrates our experience, transcends our function, and has a personal relationship with us.
Example: We are each living that mystery play – that mysterious drama of which the Christian myth is a summary. Each in our own way play out that drama we call life. Each of us give birth to or abort the divine in us. Each of us chooses whether we are going to wash our hands of meeting that splendid call of our own being, or whether we will crucify it on our own political, monetary, or power hungry demands. Each of us makes the decision of whether we will denounce our relationship with the love that is in our own heart.
We don’t have to be a saint to live that Mystery. We are living it now! We live every tiny part of the story. For some of us, one tiny part of that grand story becomes a central theme for us — motherhood, the loss of the lover, the departed parents, the betrayal, the struggle with the forces of evil, or that grand search for the beloved.
What part of the story are you experiencing? Is it the raising of the dead? The healing of personal blindness? Feeding the hunger of the multitude? Working in the garden of life? Being a shepherd?
In dreams and religion Christ is also represented as the son of the Cosmos or God. This aspect of Christ possibly comes about because of a sense many people have that the origin of their personal life is from beyond the Earth. This powerful urge to see oneself as more than a physical body is symbolised by Christ, a being who transcends physical boundaries. Perhaps this is why the film ET is so moving for many.
Human beings of all ages have, when opening to the influence of their larger perceptions during meditation, trance, prayer, or drug use, experienced awareness of love existing behind the creation of things, a love that is the source of the big-bang itself, a love that willingly died that we might exist. Humanity became aware of this at a particular stage of the development of self-awareness. The arrival at this stage of self-awareness was expressed in what we know as the historical Jesus. The internal awareness of the love that gave us being was projected outwardly and became the Christian Myth.
As one man who encountered Christ said, “Christ is like the sun, a principle of nature. No one can own it, although different individuals or groups can relate to it or use it in various ways, as happens with electricity. The Roman Catholic Church cornered the market so to speak. Prior to the Council of Nicaea there was a free market. You could say the church fenced off a beach and started charging people to go to it on Sundays. And there are different names for this natural principle in different languages.”
See: meetings with Christ; religion and dreams; Archetype of the self.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What aspects of the Christ archetype, if any, am I influenced by?
Am I repulsed or held by the influence of the ‘live by these rules’ pressure?
Am I helped by the belief there is a divine loving presence?
Do I feel the power of an inner wonder and potential I am allowing into my life?
In recognising my relationship with Christ, can I evolve it to something more satisfying?
Try Talking with a Dream Character.