About Time

 It’s been a while since I’ve felt I had something I wanted to say, about dreams, about healing the wounded feminine, about smashing patriarchy. I firmly believe the patriarchy can be dismantled because it’s just a state of mind projected by the collective waking dream.  Unfortunately, judging by the current 85 percent of the global population following patriarchal religions under male dominion, god the Father, God the Son, we’re not waking up anytime soon. 

What can I possibly say I ask myself? 

 

What I’ve always said.

 

L.I.T.A. 

 

Love is the answer.

 

Love is the only cosmic force there is that can get our collective ass out of the monolithic sling that is six thousand years of Father Knows Best.

 

Despite the everyday shootings, despite the despicable men in leadership around the world, with their stone cold hearts, allowing, encouraging and perpetrating atrocities on humanity daily, there is a growing recognition in people worldwide that love is the only force that can save humanity from itself.

 

What love has over patriarchal power is that love endures beyond the moment of death and accompanies us through our journeys in the afterlife, hooking us up with people we love and who love us that have already crossed death.

 

As long as love accompanies me, fear can be overcome.  

 

Can hate be overcome?  I don’t know. I don’t know if the toxic level of male driven, father god condoned misbehavior on the part of so many can be righted.  Will the patriarchs give up their power willingly?  

 

I once had some wonderful dreams I titled Galactic Journey #1 and # 2.

 

In them I concede to uniformed guards questioning me that I am visiting here, actually, and will be glad to return from whence I’ve come.  

 

I see the dream worlds as gateways and windows to “from whence I come” and to "where I shall return.”  For that reason, I’m deeply committed to teaching about dreaming as organic spirituality.  Organic because it’s innate in each of us.  We all dream, despite the dismissal of the importance of dreaming in the prevalent paradigm of western culture.

 

I’m fond of saying that patriarchal religion is to spirituality what patriarchal pornography is to sexuality.  Spirituality and sexuality are the two libido drives Jung identified as the psychic motivational forces that propel human actions.  Patriarchal religions discourage or forbid, depending on how stringent the particular culture, individual spirituality based on one’s own lived experience or independent sexuality based on how good it feels when not demonized psychologically.

 

We can come to real truths by paying attention to our dreaming at the same time that we are paying attention, “being mindful” in our waking lives. The best thing about dreams is that you can answer many questions of importance to your waking and spiritual life for yourself.  You find friends, teachers and guides in dreams.  You are assured by the ones who love you and have died before you, that you are never, ever alone or separated when love is the bond.

 

Since hate, anger and fear are also potent energies, I think they might live on, too, but not for those who love.  Like attracts like; the rules of the non-physical aren’t rules, they’re energy.  If our energy is malevolent, we will continue in malevolence. Malevolence is not a happy place to spend eternity, especially if you get a taste of your own medicine, which is likely.

 

How do I know?  I’ve been respecting my dreams for some 50 years.  I’ve been learning what other dream explorers teach for all that time.  Dreaming is an art form like any other, it takes effort and practice, but it pays off big and quickly becomes a delight.

 

So, in the face of everything that must be done, in the face of all the ugliness in the physical environment we share, there is a reason we each are in it at present, that we are each alive.  It’s not one reason and one reason alone; it’s up to each person to open their hearts and discover it.

 

I ask myself, what have I learned in my life that I will take with me past death, and what can I do, now, while I’m still here?  When I’m dead, I know from dreaming that I can create my exit. I know from dreaming that the laws of the non-physical are all about intent, awareness and will.  Above all, they are all about love. And I know from dreaming the experience of true bliss, the wisdom of the soul, the pure light of love, that there's not much to fear of death.

 

I want to do what I can to activate love in myself and in anyone else who graces my path in life.  I want you to do what you can in the same way.  Talk about an epidemic.  What has hate become?  Why are so many people dying violently at the hands of angry guys with guns blazing?  Why is there so much self-righteous anger? Because the collective dream we’re living is deeply unbalanced; it threatens all that is good and natural.

 

The way I see it, I somehow volunteered to staff, for however long, the Love squad on this planet now, when it seems quite on the edge of implosion. I came because the answers are simple, even if the odds against enough people opening to this simplicity seem insurmountable. I came because I will, at some point be going back, when I die, and then I can apply what I’ve learned here working with the Love squads on other dimensions.

 

It’s a work in progress, as it is for you.  Maybe the 100^thmonkey is a real thing; if enough of us speak out for a liberty that transcends those tired old paradigms, maybe we can make it the new normal.  Homo sapiens have been around, conservatively for over 200,000 thousand years; what’s a mere 6,000? We can do this; we can dream a new dream; one we want to see come true.

 

And if our efforts seem futile in this life, there’s more life to come after death.   We’ll be able to use the heart we’ve gained from our physical experiences to live the life we love where physical roadblocks to living our best selves do not exist.  

Meanwhile, dreaming the ordinary little dream and the prophetic, lucid or OBE get us beyond our ego driven physical obsessions, to seeing the bigger picture, the spiritual beings we are and always will be.

 

May we all do whatever we can to strengthen our hearts and follow through with our spiritual goals so that we leave this physical dimension better by whatever scale we can, little or big.  Making a difference, or even just making the effort, in the service of Love brings us to a much better place after death.  

May we all follow Love and may Love follow each of us.

 

A Midsummer Dream

photo by A. Kaiser

I recently officiated for the first time at a very dear friend's wedding and was honored with the opportunity to give a short talk on their behalf to introduce the grand event.  What a wedding it was.

When I give a talk, my first care is for those whom I'm addressing; how do I speak so as to give something that might be of value to the good folks in front of me?  In this case, it's also, how do I honor my friend and her wonderful guy; I want them to be happy they asked me.

I produced several drafts of my speech, searching for meaning and brevity combined so I have some bits left over I can use here.  What I left out was mostly about projections in romantic relationships, realizing, though I find this topic fascinating, my audience might appreciate getting on with the ceremony and perhaps to the cocktail hour.  At least reading is voluntary, so here are those thoughts:

Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist of a hundred years ago said that for many people, romantic love and sometimes even marriage is really a fantasy based on the perfect picture of the other that each person is projecting.  “My prince, my princess”, but as the shine wears off over time and they gradually fail to live up to each other’s projected expectations, the fireworks begin.

It takes time to find out who another person is at the soul level; many people are too caught up in building a fairy tale life to take the time to know each other.

The naked truth of marriage is not that “the two shall become one” but that the two shall become three, whether they have children or not, the two becomes three.  I have my soul journey to walk, my husband or wife has his or hers.  Neither of us has a right to impose projections on the other.  But there is a third in a good relationship, it’s the spirit of who we become together, the partnership itself is a life force, if we walk our soul paths together with love and understanding, it only gets better through the years.

What I love about following a dream practice is that it's easier to recognize and own my projections, thereby sparing myself and others much grief.  Here's a real life example:

Last September I had the absolute good fortune of attending a Michael Franti concert at a very small venue where I was in the front of a crowd of just a few hundred adoring Franti fans, myself included.

In my opinon, Michael Franti has it together and is an emissary of Love. Most Franti fans are pretty cool, they're on the same vibe.

But there was this one woman right behind me who had obviously been to a long cocktail hour before the show and who had a passionate, therefore drunkenly unleashed, projection on to Michael's drummer.  She was screaming for the drummer, lost in the fantasy that he would complete her if only he would return her singular devotion.   As she was screaming the poor guy's name through Michael's songs I finally gave her a look that said, "please be more respectful of all of us"  and she did quiet down some, thankfully.  She was lost inside her own projection that night and she wasn't really present with the crowd, the music and the artists.  

Perhaps this woman, lost inside this pigment of her own infatuation, really wants to be African and play the drums like that?  She's plainly not aware that she doesn't know this man who may have a perfectly good family/love partner to go home to and may not appreciate silly, screaming, inappropriate fans.  This is an example of a relationship projection that's pretty common in pop-idolatry culture, but it can also serve to illustrate the dynamic of personal relationships, up close, in the family model

.  

As a therapist and counselor and as a friend, the issues I've heard related again and again are about relationships, especially, romantic ones, happy or ones gone bad.  The counsel of dreams, in my experience and that of countless dreamers I've heard say the same, is that you must, as Jung would put it, mind your own Shadow first, the dark and the light. I've written an intro to the Shadow archetype here.

What made me truly happy as I officiated my friend's wedding is that she and her partner have been together for nine years and have stripped away much of those early mutual projections.  I don't know how else it can be done.  It takes time to know another and to know oneself.  The good news about relationships is that loving is a lot lighter and more fun when the personal projections are cleared.  

I had such a wonderful time at this wedding and so did everyone else there, that I thought you'd enjoy seeing a picture of my young friend with her beloved.

Wish you all a very blessed Summer Solstice season. 

Projections

We live in a wonderful age!  I know things seem to be going to hell in a hand -basket, but the amount of revolutionary thinking exploding onto the human screen is exhilarating.   Do we save the planet?  Do we destroy this incomparable biosphere?  I don’t know.  Oh, goddess, I hope not.  But all I can do is evolve.  

For so very long my favorite word has been paradigm.  I heard on some intellectual circuits that paradigm is dead and we should use meme instead.  Sorry, I like paradigm.  The word evokes an image of the boundaries I’ve drawn around my reality.  I believe this and this must not be challenged.  Good luck with that.  Paradigms are meant to be re-drawn ; that’s evolution.

Listening to some of our great contemporary spiritual  teachers , I have to count myself lucky.   We are exhorted daily by the media to worry about the economy and about our survival, but these teachers are reminding us that there is much more to our experience on this planet, or in this dimension of reality, than how much money we can make.  What can you take with you, especially if you know for sure that this “life” experience is but a chapter in our book?

What I can take with me is the evolution of my consciousness.  What does it mean to be conscious?  If you haven’t read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth”,  I very highly recommend these as a solid answer to this question.   But just about every mystical or martial teaching around the world is based on this principle; honing awareness on the present moment, something that is aided by focus on the breath, is crucial.  The mind, the drunken monkey as the Buddhists call it, is a detriment to our well-being, our sense of balance.   The Ego, says Tolle, is insane, driven insane by the constant messaging of negative, anxious or fearful thoughts  in the mind.  Being  is more important than Ego, as I like to put it, there’s more to me than meets the I. 

Jung, that wonderful old witch doctor, as he called himself, developed a powerful, if a bit esoteric, paradigm for the psyche of a person.  Central to his thinking is that each person must develop an open dialogue between the Ego, the center of consciousness, and the Self, the center of the unconscious.   He held a firm conviction that  our psychic affairs are far more important than our wordly ones, in fact, that when we remain unaware of the transpersonal nature of the unconscious, and so ignore it, we project all our blind beliefs into the world and create the mess we find ourselves in.  So, as he put it, “The world hangs by a thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.” (If he were writing today, I'm sure he'd use more inclusive language.)

What  excites me so very much is that by connecting us with the multi-dimensional experiences of the unconscious, dreaming teaches us to be more conscious  in our waking life.  A dream practice is a very royal road to expanded consciousness.

Projection is an unconscious need we fulfill.  I feel unlovely or, a man might feel unmanly, so I fall in “love” with someone other than my husband/wife,  (without deep love and respect, familiarity often breeds contempt)  and have a torrid affair.  Long story short, it all blows up into a frightful relational mess, until I examine my own story, my waking life, and ask, “What part of fulfilling this story did I play?” If we pay attention, our dreams will tell us in no uncertain terms, but in a way that inspires us to move forward, not wallow in shame or guilt.  Collective projections are probably the scariest: mobs, fans, religious fanaticisms of all sorts.  These lead to blood shed that leaves us reeling, but as that old joke says, “In an avalanche, no one snowflake feels responsible.”

Withdrawing projection, individual and collective,  is a huge psychological accomplishment. Taking responsibility for my own life story, how it plays out and accepting its outcome as A-okay, that’s the summit of individuation.  It’s enlightenment.   It’s a step-by-step, day-by-day process; there’s no arriving at enlightenment, there’s only the immediate living of it.  Being, not Ego. must drive the bus.  Or, since the Ego, to feel strong must feel in control, I entertain the metaphor that the Ego is the chauffer of my limo, but the Self, sipping champagne in the back seat, is the one who says where we’re going.

Withdrawing projections isn’t all that complicated.  I like to remind myself of Gandalf’s final words to Bilbo in “The Hobbit”, when puffed up with the success of his adventures, Bilbo gives his opinions on the prophecies.  Gandalf says to him:

  

“Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you, but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.”

To me this means, I’m part of this human story, but I’m not the whole story.  You who are other than me, have your own part to play in this story.  If our paths cross and we partner for our mutual good, let it always be in mutual respect and affection. If we don't see "I to I", then let us give each other the space to evolve as our personal timing dictates.

When people get very angry at each other, especially people who’ve previously “loved” one another, maybe married, they project like gangbusters all their hurt and disappointment on to each other. ET (Eckhart Tolle) explains this as each person projecting their own pain body on to another or others, because this also happens on a collective level in mob insanity, violence and war.  Tolle believes that we are at a watershed moment; however, that humanity is taking great leaps in the expansion of consciousness, self-awareness and withdrawal of projection.  He believes it’s happening because, as Jung predicted, if we don’t evolve into a non-egoic paradigm, we’ll bring the whole house of cards of material form down with us.  So, owning one’s own shadow is a major accomplishment on the road to individuation, and withdrawing the negative projections we have is one task in integrating the shadow and creating a better world. 

To echo ET again, some things are very hard to grasp in words and with our left brains, but we project on to others because it fulfills an unconscious need, one we have never acknowledged to ourselves.  The only way we can catch projection is when we shine the light of consciousness, the Observer, not the Ego, on to our behaviors and life situations. Of course, dreams open the doors to the rooms we must air; they present us with the images and clues we need to trace our way home.

I find this topic fascinating and tracing my own shadow through my thoughts, words, deeds and dreams extremely rewarding.  It’s not “patrolling” for negative behavior.  The shadow is not necessarily bad or dark, certainly not evil.  It’s the repressed, rejected or too painful to deal with bits of our personal history along with all our karmic stuff. Befriending a shadow aspect can bring great rewards.

The Ego projects. The Self observes, recognizes and balances the Ego.  The Ego needs a story, the drama, and often feels life-threatened.  The Self knows its own divinity, its own immortality, something the Ego must fathom in order to be strong. Dreams give us the resources, the counsel and guidance we need to achieve this breakthrough; and once enough of us do, we can dream a new dream collectively with the power to save our planet for future generations of divine little fellows, like each of us is.

If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself.

If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world,

then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself.

Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of

                         your own self-transformation."    ~ Lao Tzu

I and Thou: Dream Characters and Other People

Still reading Robert Waggoner's book on lucid dreaming (see previous post) and am delighting in the chapter: "Independent Agents and the Voice of the Unconscious" in which he poses some intriguing ideas:

"Taught to believe and expect that the entire dream exists as our imagined projection, that we dream it into being, many lucid dreamers naturally resist any notion of not completely creating and controlling the dream. Yet, these conversations suggest a new level of inherent complexity in dreaming. With experience, lucid dreamers come to realize that the dream space contains various types of dream figures, behaving with varying degrees of awareness." p.58

What, who, where are the characters in our dreams? Are they aspects of our own waking personalities that need attention and integration? Of course, but Waggoner raises the possibility of autonomy in some dream characters. A key indicator of a character's autonomy or "otherness" is when he experiences in lucid dream adventures characters who resist his intentions, give him unexpected information or profess independent viewpoints. Are dream characters projections of our own personalities, created by our dreaming minds to instruct our waking egos? Or are they, as in our waking experience, independent beings, separate from us and capable of choice, as we are?

A little mind blowing, perhaps, but how valuable a consideration. What's wonderful about the dream world is anything is possible. It doesn't have to be one way or the other; it can be both, or entirely different than expected, so dreaming offers a model for expanded consciousness and creativity in the waking world.

In ancient alchemical teachings, inner and outer realities mirror each other, as above, so below. I find this is very true with dreaming. What I learn in the dreaming, can usually come in handy in waking reality. Reflecting on waking experience, how much of what I know about other people is my own projection based on my own needs, much as I might assume the shadow figures and animus gents in my dreams are? The negative things I see about people and the people I put on a pedestal, if they were dream figures, how would I see them? Why would they be in my dream?

Considering the autonomy of dream figures in my dreams heightens my sense of my own autonomy and that of others, those I like and those I don't, in waking life. I'm more mindful of my waking projections and also more eager to look at my dreams for that spark of independence in people I encounter. Perhaps these are other dreamers sharing my dream locale or people who lived in another time or on another dimension?

One of my favorite authors, Ursula LeGuin, writes about outer space as a metaphor for inner space. In her view, inner space is the real frontier for exploration, available through the vast unconscious to all of us. Dreams help me understand myself better, and they help me understand others. In my dreams there are scenarios, like when I find myself in traffic on a highway or when I'm riding on a train or bus. that say to me, "We are multitudes, but we're all in this together." I take that feeling into my waking relationships.

The idea that dream figures may in some cases be autonomous just as I assume people in waking life are creates another dimension of exploration every time I cross the threshold of sleep. At the same time, realizing that even in waking life, people I meet reflect for me some aspect of myself, especially when they elicit strong emotional reaction, helps me interact more mindfully with everyone, keeping a check on my projections and truly honoring each individual and his or her unique life journey.