The Wheel of Life

A dear friend just experienced her daddy’s passing on Christmas day. This post is a tribute to her and her father.  It’s also a response to the constant reminder that on the wheel of time, death has a place.

For me, what inspires courage and brings me solace is knowing that even if our physical bodies cease to function, the spirit we experience now, the one we call the I, never ceases to exist.  Consciousness persists to experience itself, even after physical death.

We don’t die, anymore than a butterfly dies when it ceases to be a caterpillar.  Contrary to conventional teachings, we can communicate with those who have crossed over before us.  The main channel of communication after death is dreaming. 

We’re lucky enough to live in a time when science is taking life after death seriously, due in part to the number of verifiable NDEs (Near Death Experience) reported by both medical specialists and patients who have the experiences. There’s also the growing body of work on sleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming and OBEs (Out of Body Experiences) that explodes outdated views on life after death.  Personal experience can put us in a position to re-examine our old religious beliefs and materialistic myths.  

Modern physics is a new science that goes beyond materialistic dogma, just as contemporary spirituality goes beyond patriarchal religions.  Dreaming is something anyone can do; once a person learns to dialogue with their own dreams, a bridge beyond the physical is revealed. In fact, there are a great variety of psychic dream experiences that, with a little knowledge and effort, most dreamers can test drive for themselves.

As a dream teacher, by far the most common dream people describe to me is about someone who has crossed over.  I love validating their dream connection and honoring those amazing stories of loved one who’ve crossed over.  So many times, people are told to dismiss these dreams as wish fulfillment fantasies, though most people intuitively know their dream is uncanny.  I love seeing the relief and amazement in so many people’s eyes when we speak of their dreams of the departed as something real and important.

Dreams are an organic rainbow bridge between these two realities; they are life and death.  Each of us has access to so much more than material reality in the dream realms.  One thing for sure, our loved ones who’ve crossed over speak to us in dreams.  We can nurture that communication as much as we want by always paying attention to our dreams.  

Our loved ones still love us and know that we have the tougher road here in the contemporary material world, with its political insanities and wars.

Our loved ones still want to help us.  They also have their own affairs to look after; there is a point that we might want to let them go on.  But grief is a state of being that must be honored. When we lose a loved one; there is no way around, only through the grief.  I’ve found dreams guide us through the grieving and recovery process, in part by granting us access still to our beloved.  Relationships can continue and they can evolve.  I’ve grown to understand many things about my parents, and about myself, because we continue to know each other in the dream realms.

Through dream teachings, I’ve come to better understand the importance of forgiveness. What would we do if we couldn’t reach out to those who’ve crossed and ask for or give our forgiveness?  We would be consumed with unresolvable remorse and regret.   Dreams help us understand that death is not an end to the connection. Death leaves a huge physical vacuum in our lives and that hurts, but dreams open a window we can explore to a new kind of connection, one that can bring us the consolation we need to keep healing from our pain. 

The other day, a friend told me a beautiful dream she had days before her beloved mother’s death. In it her father, who had predeceased her mother by many years, was hustling her mother out of a cab in a city where they used to live. My friend wondered at the dream and was saddened by it somewhat, but when we spoke of it, I could see in her eyes and hear in her “ahhh” that the dream’s importance just knocked on the door of her consciousness.  

Many people are drawn to see a medium when they lose a loved one.  I’m not attracted to this option, though I do respect the psychic virtuosos among us.  But, as Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet of the 20^thcentury wrote, each of us is capable of psychic understanding if we pursue it in the laboratory of our dreams. I don’t fault anyone who seeks the guidance of a psychic to connect with a loved one, but I wonder that people aren’t more interested in learning how to connect to those they love themselves.  Dreams are a bridge to the afterlife; they give us experiences of both sides.  If we each pay attention and develop our own dream practice, we don’t need mediums to mediate our personal connections to our departed.

I thank my dreams for messages they’ve brought from my mom and dad, for how they’ve helped each of us, on both sides of the divide, grow in love and compassion.  I thank dreams for keeping me connected to this essential part of my life, my relationship to those I loved and lost from this temporal dimension. Dreaming isn’t the only way to connect to our beloved departed, but in my estimation, dreams are the most organic.  We’ve born dreaming and dreaming we’ll exit, if we’re lucky.

In the meantime, I’m alive.  Knowing what dreams have taught me about life and death helps shape my  waking existence.  Ecclesiastes said we came naked into this world and naked we’ll return.  We can’t take any material thing with us; what we do take with us is what we’ve  become through our own actions on earth.  

According to the celebrated expert on OBEs, William Buhlman, outside of the physical dimensions, like attracts like quite readily.  Think of the power of attraction on steroids. My motto is if you don’t want to be spending your next existence on another plane living with assholes, then just don’t be one now.   Endeavor to learn how to choose the essential and dismiss the not important.   I choose love so that Love is where I land when I cross over; it’s simple.  

Religion purports to offer guarantees about our “salvation” if we pony up with whatever is required.  They claim God is Love, but stack the deck for themselves, the rich male patriarchs, and psychologically handicap the rest of us with guilt, sin and other bull-crap. We don’t need religion to feel ok about the afterlife. It’s not that God is love; it’s that Love is god.  Love is an energy that’s vital to life, not an anthropomorphic projection that looks just like the guys in charge.  Choose Love and Love will guide you when you cross and help you find you’re way. Choose violence and hate and that might be your heaven when you cross; it’s a choice. 

There’s no judgment; we learn while we’re in the physical and we continue to learn, grow and understand after we’ve left the physical.  Consciousness evolves; hallelujah!  We can help ourselves along if we break out of the mesmerizing herd and smell the dreamy coffee.

The right practice and attitude towards dreaming can open important psychic channels.  The importance of dreaming doesn’t just belong on a psychiatrist’s couch; dreams belong in our daily lives.  Dream sharing in families and among friends can be wonderful fun, and dreams can bring us great personal gifts of understanding and guidance.  And, so importantly, dreams can help us heal from the grief of loss; they can help us stay connected to everyone our hearts have embraced, even after death.

Dreams can give us the courage to live from our hearts, to follow our best dreams and to triumph over our fears.  I wish everyone bright and powerful dreams in 2020 and all of us, the courage to make our best dreams come true for the good of all. 

May it be so.

In a Time of Shock, There's Awe

I've been a long time pondering if there's anything left to say.  One after another collective shock wave hits the news.  Misguided hate filled males opening up with their beloved guns and decimating an innocent group of people; for why?  Leaders inciting that hate so they can get elected and continue their multinational bid for total patriarchal control over everything and everyone, at the expense of the very planet, without which, they too shall die.  The rollercoaster ride of economic survival.  I can go on and on, but for what?

Giving a great deal of attention and energy to the shit that's regularly hitting the collective fan around the world makes me tense and fearful if I don't also take time to give attention to what's happening in my inner dream worlds. Pondering this, I see that, there's the rub.  If I focus on fear and dread, despite that what's actually happening in my personal life now is positive, I not only create a mighty stress in my own physical body, I contribute to the collective stress that surrounds me.  Eckhart Tolle's work is brilliant in making a case to average people for that old meditational chestnut:
BE HERE NOW.

Most of our fear is based on our internal drama and dialogue, despite what's actually happening in our surroundings now.  Fears about what might happen if such and such happens can keep us awake at night time and again.  One remedy I always prescribe is when you wake up at night and know you might have trouble getting back to sleep, treat that time as an opportunity to enter any dream that comes to mind and consider it play time.  I often will play with a particular dream for months because of a character, place or experience I want to develop further in my story telling mind.  It may or may not get you back to sleep, though it often does, and it beats the hell out of worrying thoughts and their consequences.

My dream practice has helped me keep a foot in the temporal earth world and in other dimensions in the eternal worlds of dreaming, which is where the AWE comes in.  Dreaming is organic spirituality; it's our birthright bridge to the eternal without the dusty layers of dogmatic oppression patriarchal religions add to our burden on our journey home.  We each have a reason for being on planet physical earth; we each have something to offer and something to learn.  Mind control religions entrap us in unnecessary suffering and privation. A God/Goddess who has nothing to fear doesn't need anything from us. Divine love isn't based on need.  It is simply What Is.  There is no need to limit or define it; there is every need to experience it.  Dreams are a door to that experience; a direct life line to the Awe in life that keeps us living, hoping and loving.

Throughout life, my dreams have companioned me in a way that has guided, taught and entertained me. I turn to my dreams for answers and for experiences beyond the dull and dreaded in my life.  I'm schooled morally by my dreams way beyond the shalts and shalt nots of Nobodaddy tenets.  I know the unconditional love of the Divine through my dreams; it can take so many forms and act in so many wonderful ways, as some of our ancestors knew.   Locking the Divine in exclusively Male Form is the most damaging psychic wound inflicted on us by patriarchal codes. We project on to the Divine in metaphors and similes; god is like this or goddess is like that.  But, knowing Divine Love in dreams is to know it never keeps just one form; you know you're in the presence of Divine Love by the Awe you feel  Sometimes it takes on surprising forms, but it doesn't have physical form because, ultimately like us, it's not physical.

In a time of so much shock the awe of inner exploration is a salve for the soul.  A dream practice isn't a place to hide from the world, but it can be a spiritual retreat zone.  A resource I can draw on, at times of trouble or trepidation or just for a break and a change of attitude.  It matters whether I choose to live in shock or in awe.  Depending on where you are physically in the world, like in religious totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia, especially if you're a woman, like Loujain al-Hathloul, you may not have an easy choice. Choosing spiritual freedom can be dangerous when patriarchy uses its brutality to enforce their choice on us. But, for those of us who can make that choice relatively easily, once we heal our own psyche from the damage so much brainwashing has done, we can help others to find their own healing and perhaps, together, keep this world going.

Jung's fans know his teachings about our need to heal the individual and the collective psyche; he said the fate of man hangs on a thread, and that thread is the human psyche. What does that mean?  We've got to become conscious of our choices and what fuels them at an unconscious level.  Fear is a primal human emotion that's easy to use for mind games.  Patriarchy loves using fear to control people's behavior and, historically, has done so in fantastic feats of cruelty.

Every time I review the dark periods of our history some of us call the Burning Times, basically where it was legitimate to brutalize and torture women into submission to the patriarchal yoke of servitude, my stomach gives a familiar lurch.  This is all too real.    Ms. Loujain al-Hathloul, held in captivity for a year and a half and counting for her feminist campaign to drive and to change the many other petty restrictions of her basic human freedoms under the patriarchal domination of modern Saudi Arabia. These restrictions, which in such a theocracy is also the rule of law,  are mostly based on religious imperatives. Loujain was recently offered her freedom on the condition that she lie about everything they've done to her; tortures like those of the burning times. She is still in Saudi prison.  When will we free Her? 

Healing the human psyche is about acknowledging that we know shit about so many things, but most of all about the exact experience of life after life and about the Divine.  That Which Is is vast and contains all us multitudes, so how can it be as simple as one story, one myth?  Why should we fight each other about what It should be when we're all going to experience it for what it is eventually?  Why don't we take the opportunity our dreams offer us to learn more about those ultimate questions for ourselves?

Of course, the most convenient way to control someone is psychically.  Get them to buy into a particular story, especially when they're young, and they'll do what you tell them to do.  As soon as we are born, we're baptized and cathechismed till the cows come home.  I often think when a parent says to me, I'll send them to church, synagogue, mosque whatever now and when he/she becomes an adult, he/she can decide for him/herself.  But it doesn't work that way!  Once our little imaginations are denied freedom and instilled with fear, it's not all that easy to shake.

What we believe to be true is our reality.  Patriarchal dogmas in all big 3 religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as in other male elevating spiritual practices, including Buddhism, have convenient stories about why women are bad and why everyone needs to tow a certain line in order to safely transition to the other side.

They're not even that good, as stories go.  So, I'm to believe that the Divine is so super pissed off at a couple of newly minted Homo sapiens, male and female, for eating an apple, or even for wanting to know Good/Evil so they can choose for themselves?  I'm to believe that the very Life Force, the Light, the overpowering certainty of Love that I've known in dreaming so many times, not only condemned all future generations but blamed the woman, especially?

And the stories go on, all in the service of why no-one, especially women, should question this male structured mental, emotional and social paradigm that is still grinding along, on an inexorable track to planetary destruction.  As I told my dad in a dream once, patriarchy has been one blood bath after another.  But it doesn't have to continue this way.

Dreams are bridges to self-discovery and to social healing; dreams call on each of us to own our spiritual health as well as our mental and physical health.  Dreams call us to lead a life that acknowledges our own responsibility for our own path.  They call on us to live bravely because, in the end, literally in the end, there is nothing to fear.

The myth of original sin is fabricated to prepare the human psyche for other fear based strictures religions love to impose.  Once you fear God and HIS minions, you'll do what they tell you to do, whether it's to your own benefit or the benefit of your beloved ones is irrelevant because your thought allegiance has been won over.

But if you're not afraid of God/the Divine in any way, your life is an adventure in the physical; you live on the continuum of other adventures you've experienced on other planes or in other times. Past lives are frequently remembered in dreams.  You can know some of what you'll experience after death because you've already experienced it through dreaming.  It's the awe of these encounters with the divine that eclipses all fear and all doubt.  There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.

The only thing that makes sense to me these days is for each of us to do whatever we can, say whatever we can, in the most loving way, to take down the wall of fear that's being steadily reconstructed before our eyes, always looking inward for guidance and advice from dreams and holding hands with fellow/sister dreamers with the purpose of healing ourselves and the planet from the wrathful, wrongful paradigms that keep us in this dismal cycle of doom.

There is no original sin, it's the same thing over and over; why?  Because we're adhering to the same paradigms of rigid Father oriented, male dominated insanity that created this problem in the first place.  Come on, just listen to that ignorant congressman King from Iowa wondering if he would be alive but for the wise forbearance for rape and incest in human history; tell me that's not messed up!

That guy thinks he's a good, god-fearing Christian and there's no doubt he serves the patriarchal idol of god he and others constructed so it would be okay to think that super fucked up way. Women don't even figure into the equation. But the Jesus he supposedly follows championed a woman's right to equal treatment and opportunity again and again in the gospels. Jesus was a feminist.

I can live in shock that we've actually elected patriarchal one dimensional puppets like King, (and worse than him, too) or I can live in awe that at least I was born into a time and live in a place where I can challenge patriarchy because of what I know to be true.  Practice love and look to dreams; that's what I know to be true.

FREE HER!

I just read that Loujain al-Hathloul is also, while tortured and imprisoned, cyberbullied by the Saudi regime on Twitter, but thanks to her brother, Walid al-Hathloul, twitter world is fast debunking their fake story.

I wish Loujain's plight didn't remind me so deja vu of the European Inquisition, the witch trials of  several hundred years of patriarchy on steroids known as the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  After years of feminism in America, (don't forget, men are feminists, too) I thought we were done with women's inequality.  Yet, misogyny is growing around the world.  Apparently, we're not done making it clear that God is not the Father, as in a Male Supreme Deity that makes the laws and puts the men in charge of enforcing them. It's not clear yet that we, Women, are not men's property by divine default. We hold up half the sky.

We are not slaves.  Some women are born into the strictest patriarchal regimes, others are born into recently turned mild-mannered patriarchies of modern western countries (although, scarily, even these seem to be regressing badly at the moment).  Either way, we are spirit in female bodies as men are spirit in male bodies.  The absurd extremes of male and female gendering all over the patriarchal world are so unnecessary, so distracting, so harmful to our essential journey on this planet.

Look at the state we're in.  Who has been making the rules for the last 5 or 6 millennia?  How have half the human race fared (faired) under these regimes?  Today, women are either tits and ass to exploit or baby machines to harness and control for men's sake; that's the patriarchal dichotomy of women, the Virgin and the Whore.  We are spirit in a physical body.  We are here for a purpose of our own choosing, just like anyone incarnate as a man.

It's possible for us to envision and dream a much better world than the one we're rolling with at the moment.  How would I go about my dream of a much better world?  Step one; bring the patriarchal nobodaddies, in myth and politics, down to size.  Raise the Feminine Divine in our Consciousness to equal status with the Male Divine.  They are partners, creating together, even though, (as was obvious to our ancestors living before the darkness of patriarchy), She's the one Who gives Life, so she's got just a wee bit more juju than Dad. Patriarchy teaches us to think in dualities and in oppositions.  We can think creatively.  We can reason with our hearts, not just our heads, to create a world we want for ourselves and for our children for many more generations to come.

Synchronicity is when the world of matter reflects the world of the psyche; that's how Jung, the author of that term for this phenomena, explains it.  Like a powerful dream, a powerful synchronicity in waking life can help keep me on course; they can be profoundly encouraging to the spirit.

The night I wrote my previous post about Loujain and other Saudi women imprisoned and tortured for their audacity to challenge the absurd constraints of the male regime, I went in search, among my journals, for a dream I remembered that echoed this misogynist waking life event. 

My journals are all labeled with the year on their spine, but strangely, I unknowingly picked the wrong journal from a decade later than the year I intended.  In it, I searched through the appropriate month and day, but was puzzled when I couldn't find the dream I wanted. As I'm turning the pages, I'm stopped in my tracks by this fragment of a dream from 9 years ago that I don't remember ever dreaming:

FREE HER!
Somehow I'm helping make sure a woman prisoner is released.

The way I see synchronicity, this is a kindly numinous pat on the shoulder.   "Yeah, girl, you go on behalf of a sister in need; your Mama is right here with you."

 Cooperation.  Compassion.  Justice of the Heart.

Imagine what wonderful changes we could make if Love were our only religion and each one of us does the best we can to help, not control, one another.

Thank goodness for troubadours like Michael Franti who help me keep the perspective I need.

This World is so Fucked up (But I Ain't Ever Giving up on It)

Michael Franti & Spearhead

Let me tell you 'bout the situation goin' on
Up inside my head today
My mind is runnin' round in circles
Tryna make sense of the people
Who are runnin' everything today

All these politicians tweetin'
Got their message on repeat and
Try dividin' us with fear and the hate

Whey-ey-ey
I wish I could find a better way to say this

This world is so fucked up
But I ain't never givin' up on it
Never givin' up on it
Never givin' up on it
This world is so fucked up
But I ain't never givin' up on it
Never givin' up on it
Never givin' up

Whey-ey-ey
I wish I could find a better way to say this

We ain't askin' for money
We just wanna make change
We do it for all of the people who need it
'Cause they got a voice and a name
I can't believe how we livin' today
I got… 

Source: Musixmatch

Saudi Arabia or Patriarchal Nightmare?

How many times have I told you about Howling Mary?  How many times have I explained why she howls?

I hear Her in my bones, down to the marrow of my soul when I think of the the courageous Saudi women activists who helped lift the driving ban for their sisters in Saudi Arabia (SA) but despite the change in law now allowing women to drive (but do they?), were detained for a year now without charges.  What's way worse is that there are many accounts of these women being tortured and sexually tormented; do you know that the witch trials of the terrible Inquisition period of patriarchy treated women the same way?

Do you know that women were heckled, beaten, arrested, imprisoned and tortured (force fed,  among other things) for having the audacity to claim the right to vote and even to use contraception to avoid pregnancy in this here US of A just one century ago? Read what Margaret Sanger went through to get the diaphragm legalized or what the many suffragette activists endured, here and in countries around Europe.

Do women in western countries consider themselves safe from this kind of state sanctioned personal control?  Think of Kamala Harris's question; name one law that legislates any part of the male anatomy or his sexual freedom.  Please don't say rape; rape is not a sexual crime.  It's a crime of violence and denigration of women; misogyny on steroids.  Despite western woman's relative freedom; in the US, she's about to be put back in the Father Know's Best box.  If a woman can't choose whether or not to be pregnant, if she can be pregnant and obliged to give birth whether she wants to or not, then she is not an equal citizen with a man in this country or in any country.

Mary is Howling because she is sick of the destruction and needless pain caused by patriarchal bullies around the world.  She is calling all who value the many gifts woman brings with her to the earth and in her partnership with man to stand up and say no more!  No more corruption!  No more belief in false deities that give anyone with a dick a huge advantage over their partner sex turned handmaid.

That Which Is, that which we can come to know experientially over our entire lives through our inner senses and our dreams, is above all kind, above all loving, above all, loves to laugh.  The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless, said Dorothy Sayers, author of the beloved Lord Peter Wimsey detective series.  We are spirit; after we shed this physical bag of bones, it makes no never mind which bag we were wearing.  We are called on to be kind, to be loving and to be joyous regardless of our physical exterior.

I plan to contribute my voice to the cause of Loujain, Iman, Aziza, Samar, Nassima and the other women so unjustly and irreverently treated by the self appointed guardians of their good, the male elite of SA.  I also want to know what officials in our government plan to do to address this unspeakable human rights violation.  I hope you'll join me in dreaming a world were Mary's voice can again be heard singing in joy, not howling in pain.

The Bulldog and His Patriarchy

I mentioned in my previous post what fun dream archeology can be; I'm still on the trail of the bulldog.  Here's an interesting bit I found in Wikipedia:

Bulldogs have a longstanding association with 
English culture, as the BBC wrote: "to many the Bulldog is a national icon, symbolizing pluck and determination."^[6] During World War II, Bulldogs were often likened to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his defiance of Nazi Germany.^[7] When the English settled in the Americas, their Bulldogs came with them. 

Interesting, it's definitely an English breed, but when I re-enter and check these ideas out with the bulldog in my dream, he wants me to explore further.  With a further search, I found that the reason they're called bulldogs is because back in the male fraternity of Medieval and Renaissance England, this hapless dog was bred for the sole (souless) purpose of watching it gore or be gored by a bull who was maddened beforehand by pepper blown up it's nose. It was the male sport of the day.

I digress here, but it reminds me of the story going around in my neck of the woods about people, some say the very coaches on the team, of an upscale township that shall remain nameless, (although it made the GoodWeek/BadWeek section of this week's Week Magazine), confronted with the cold reality that their kid's playing field was too wet to allow the scheduled games to commence, made the bold and mystifying decision to soak the field in gasoline and set it on fire so as to dry the field and allow the games to go on.

What planet are these people from?  How did 20 adults come to a decision so misguided and ill-advised? Yes, the field was destroyed, just for starters.  My neighbor and I were talking; he's well versed in school sports cultures, having followed his daughters teams as they grew up. We shake our heads and ask each other, how was this the decision of so many adults?

Do you see where I'm going with this?  How was bull baiting and bear baiting the decision of so many, so called, Christian adults?  

It's patriarchy.  The bulldog was bred as a symbol and a sacrifice to patriarchal insanity.  We treat patriarchy as if it's the only option we have for organizing a culture, when it's not.  Patriarchy isn't all of human history; it's a small distorted fraction. Homo sapiens (a rather ironic label for humanity as we know it, coined by an 18th century Swiss botanist) has been around for hundreds of thousands of years; "Thanks to the work of exceptional scholars like archeologist Marija Gimbutas, we know that: “The Goddess is the most potent and persistent feature in the archeological records of the ancient world, a symbol of the unity of life in nature and the personification of all that was sacred and mysterious on earth.”

Patriarchy is only some 6,000 years old! It's dualistic, focused on differences and competition; whoever pisses the farthest sets the rules for right and wrong, and uses all manner of cruelty, violence and inhumanity to enforce them.  

How can such cruelty to animals be allowed? Well, it was a sanctioned male sport until one of the first laws against cruelty to animals was passed in the mid 19th century. In patriarchy, male sports help develop the future generation of soldiers and keep the win/lose, either or mentality sharp for when war is declared.  

One of the characteristics of my dream bulldog is that he would occasionally roll his eyes, which made him look insane; then he'd resume a direct look and return to his doggie nature.  His crazy eye roll got me to pondering about the insanity of the bulldog as mascot for the patriarchal story. 


We've learned little about pre-patriarchal cultures in our history classes because history is the story the conqueror writes. In the last century, many vistas have been opened and explored.  Women have done their own scholarship and found that the male establishment's explanation of ancient artifacts and cultures has been tainted with patriarchal projection on to the ancient past, mansplaining cultures who were nothing like patriarchy in structure and function. "Goddess worshiping cultures weren’t necessarily matriarchal, they were, as Riane Eisler brilliantly presents in The Chalice and the Blade, cooperative societies." 

Ancient cultures existed that were perhaps far in advance of our own on many levels, like in using what we now call psi skills.  This internal authority of the hoi polloi was frowned upon during the brutal RC Inquisition, so we've come to be raised knowing little, discounting or sometimes fearing our dreaming.

The patriarchal paradigms reign with fear, exist in hierarchies of human worth, denigrate half the human race with misogynist rules and thinking, can only think in good/bad dualism and project their own self important image, an anthropomorphized male deity who hates women for their lack of obedience and submission, on to the Male Only Divine.

Ancient cultures weren't patriarchal.  Whatever they were before patriarchy took over with the sword, they were very interesting people, our ancestors.  And beyond a doubt, women were respected and the Goddess was revered for the gifts She gives humanity.  Goddess paradigms don't need the idea of duality, they practice the idea of the dance of life, where each person, male or female, does their best, according to what they desire to do.

But I digress, yet again. As an animus figure, Jung would have a field day with my bulldog in this dream; that's what I'm doing, too.  Just like there's a wounded Feminine Divine archetype in the patriarchal paradigm, one that Jung acknowledged, there's a wounded Male Divine archetype, too.  Actually, and fittingly so, today is the day of the international celebration of that wounding, Good Friday.

Patriarchal gods are constantly demanding sacrifice; ask Isaac how he felt about his dad's religious beliefs that almost got him killed.  Patriarchal theology is the psychic arm for the hostile takeover of  ancient spiritualities that payed great tribute to the Feminine Divine. It's easy to see how patriarchy claimed as their super power, the power to deal death.  

The Goddess is the direct giver of life.  Goddess cultures saw death as part of the cycle of a soul's journey, not an end but a new beginning. Many ancient burial sites suggest that care was taken at the body's burial to provide the soul the wherewithal to travel on. But Fear of Death is the supreme ultimate bogart in our cultural patriarchal closet; there are so many ways to mess up and the patriarchal god that rules on one's eternal continuance is demanding and hard to please.

So perhaps, as we all resurrect our way back home naturally, and quite organically, we can see in Jesus' sacrifice, not a necessary adherence to his father's terms of forgiveness for the human race, but a willing warrior for Love, who dared all by defying the strict patriarchal religion into which he was born, and paid the ultimate price to be a truly non-patriarchal man and a model for healing the wounded Male architype, the wounded Animus.  

For me, this is the day that launched my fascination with dreams, synchronicity and imagination; I call it Crocodile Friday.

Hey Bulldog

fittingly enough,
 this lovely fella is on the wine label of a wine called Paxis

Dreams have thrilled me with revelations for so many years that I put nothing past them.  Yesterday’s dream is this kind of wonderful.

A dream is so often quirky and odd, even just a fragment of a dream. I’ve wished out loud that I could collect a nickel every time someone says to me about a dream, “it was so weird.” Add a little frisson of fear or just ickiness, and you’ve got a gold mine for dream exploration.

The revelatory meaning of a dream starts to unfold as I’m writing it down. First, I rehearse it in my head, re-living my dream ego's experience visually so I get the best memory of it possible. Then I record it, either by writing it down manually or dictating it to my email via iphone, later to be printed out for my journal.    Either way, the act of recording helps the dream come into the waking world where it’s gifts can manifest.  Plus, it helps the dream story stick in my head for further pondering.  

It's when I’m pondering the dream story in my head or re-reading it in  my journal entry, that the “aha” moments come, sometime fast and furious, like puzzle pieces falling into place.  

Understanding is more than a left brain “explanation” of what the dream might mean.  Dreams work at every level of our consciousness, from the visceral to the sublime, to unlock the existential mysteries of our being. It makes me catch my breath in wonder.

Oh, I get the bulldog in this dream, big time. I've seen him before.  And I get the little girl, too.  It’s about more than interpretation. I’ve been given a dream key to unlock a door in my psyche. I can walk through that door using dream play practices I've learned and teach; Jung called it “active imagination” and Robert Moss calls it “dream re-entry.”  

My dream, The Little Girl and the Bulldog is a treasure map for new territories to explore and new soul-healing to be found. What I want to share with you about this dream is that after all these years, my dreams keep me on my toes. They are continually  evolving my understanding, revealing to me the meaning and purpose of my physical existence with firm kindness and deep humor.  This is what makes a dream practice so worthwhile; as they do for me, they can do for you.

When I write down a dream, whether it seems like a big one or not, I give myself time to “get” it.  Often, what I might have dismissed as a nothing dream, just a fragment, is actually a powerful gift to me, one I would have missed if I hadn't paid attention.  

In this dream, I meet two characters in a dreamscape that echoes a particular time and a particular physical location from my life story.  The place is so familiar, but there are differences.  These differences and all the details of the dream give me an entry point for exploring my dream further.  Then there's the relationship I can develop with these characters.  I may recognize feelings and retrieve memories by talking to them; they may tell me things my soul needs to hear. 

Jung recommend pondering a dream, mulling it over while walking or resting, or as I've found, even standing in line at the bank. (Dream pondering is not a practice I'd recommend while driving machinery of any kind.) 

When pondering, I keep the dream with me as I go about my day. Sometimes a dream has the psychic energy to stay with me much longer, unfolding it’s meaning in lazy magic like a butterfly emerging it's cocoon.  Some dreams have the power to stay with me always.

Another tool for a dream practice is what Jung called “amplification” and Robert Moss calls “dream archeology.” Exploring the internet for clues to associations I have with this dream led me to John Lennon and his inspired poem of a song: 

Hey Bulldog

The Beatles

Sheepdog, standing in the rain
Bullfrog, doing it again
Some kind of happiness is
Measured out in miles
What makes you think you're
Something special when you smile

Childlike no one understands
Jackknife in your sweaty hands
Some kind of innocence is
Measured out in years
You don't know what it's like
To listen to your fears

You can talk to me
You can talk to me
You can talk to me
If you're lonely, you can talk to me

Big man (yeah) walking in the park
Wigwam frightened of the dark
Some kind of solitude is
Measured out in you
You think you know me, but you haven't got a clue.

You can talk to me
You can talk to me
You can talk to me
If you're lonely, you can talk to me

Hey hey

Roar

Hey, bulldog (hey bulldog)

Woof

Hey,…

Dreams are marvels of revelation; they open channels for  our personal empowerment and give us the courage to live life authentically.  

Life is more interesting for dreaming. It's our organic spirituality; we're born dreaming and dreaming we'll cross the threshold to life beyond physical death.  

Change: the Inside Out of It

I've written about my monumental dream, Howling Mary many times, but I return to Her again and again. Why was Mary howling?  That was the question I asked myself as a bright, young 21 year old woman woken from this vivid, puzzling dream.   But, as a mature woman, yes, I think now I know.

Still, that dream is my ballast.  I promised Her in that dream that I would do whatever I could to help, and here I am, still with that promise in mind. It's about changing our deepest most ingrained beliefs, not an easy thing to do.  But those beliefs have us in a world of pain.  That's why She's howling.

As a human race, for the last six thousand years or so, we have been gripped by a psychic paradigm that disrupts the fundamental balance of opposites in life to a degree that it's killing us.  What we have called evolution is devolution.  Look at the dictates we march to; who are the authors?  Who dictates by majority?  Is there balance in a male dominated world?  As a woman, I'm appalled at the number of unhinged patriarchal, misogynist monster leaders around the world today holding sway, Russia, China, N.Korea, USA.  These lunatics have our very lives in balance, and yet, they can.

Why?  Because we have core beliefs that make us vulnerable to Big Daddy dictators; God the Father paradigms that have us by the short hairs.  Psychically, we are programmed from birth to believe that we're unworthy little wretches saved from our original sin, our ancestor's faux pas, only by the ultimate sacrifice of God crucifying his only Son.  I say that's why Mary's howling; it was her son that false god crucified.

I know that our connection to spirit is the only thing that can save us from the hottest hells on earth; but that connection has been hijacked by patriarchal religions.  We are born tethered to Spirit, to Goodness, to Love.  We revisit Home often in our dreams; we are not here without support.  We came from Home and Home we'll return, but we can go Home anytime we want, when we learn to use the natural access to our spirit realms that dreams grant us.

Of course, if you never pay attention to your dreams they're gibberish, especially if you've been told all your life, like most of us have, that they are illusory, immaterial, and irrelevant.  It's just a dream.  But, when you start noticing, you start taking yourself to another level of existence.  The waking world is just one aspect of each person's reality; the dream world is just as real.  Dream realities do require certain awareness; if you go to a foreign culture, it's best to learn the language and customs in advance of your travels so you know how to navigate the experiences you'll have.

Dreaming has it's own physics that differs from material reality; that's what's so great about it.  What you can't do waking, you can do dreaming.  And sometimes, the accomplishments in the dream world undergird new accomplishments in the waking world.  It is a balance, a wholistic way of going from one day/night to the next.

The Good News is that we can change things, one of us at a time, from the inside out.  In an avalanche, no one snowflake feels responsible.  As each of us takes responsibility for connecting directly to soul, through the indigenous inside track of dreaming, we take responsibility, one by one, then in groups, until we turn this around.  And even if we don't manage it; we'll cross over on the side of things we choose.

Sea change.

The Most Important Thing

Many people shrink in dismay at having to spend family time at a funeral or wedding; I've mentioned before that I'm lucky.  As diverse a bunch as Chirino's are, we tend to stick together. Our glue is love.

I just returned from a memorial for my friend and sis-in-law's brother in my high school home town.  What I experienced is that, despite our sometimes day and night view points, we have each other's backs.  Love does that. You can believe that I am immensely grateful and appreciative of that reality in my life.

Still, these differences I mention can be like day and night; like living only in the waking world and never in the dreaming worlds, living as if only waking experiences matter.  Why has the art of dreaming been so diminished in our culture?

 A short while ago I was at the wake of a friend's mother. The preacher was a lovely young man who suggested in his eulogy, with existential Christian honesty, that he didn't know what happens after death, nobody knows. He goes on to offer the promise that faith in the death and resurrection of that amazing man, Jesus Christ, whom we must worship according to a rigorous set of precepts, depending on religious denomination, is the only road to a happy eternity.

And Jesus knows, I say this with no irony intended. Jesus is amazing, especially as a divine son, derived of this colossal six millennia long patriarchal cultural myth we've been living on this beautiful, endangered planet earth.  Thank goddess for the example he set while he was with us.  Too bad the patriarchy that killed him found ways to use his legacy to their own gain.  Following Jesus is pretty simple; Love Is The Answer.  Following patriarchal religious 'biceps' leads nowhere good.

The joke Jim and I share about that particular memorial is that when the preacher proclaimed that nobody knows about life after death, (think Monty Python, "The Life of Brian")  I could barely contain myself from raising my hand and saying,  "I do".

Anybody who pays attention to her/his dreaming life, and brings the same attention to her/his waking life, can tell you the same thing; consciousness is much greater than the brain.  Anyone who has had an NDE, OBE or lucid dream encounter with the numinous knows that there is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, than has been admitted in patriarchal theocracies.

The most important thing each of us has is our own spirit; we are connected to our spirit home through our dreams on a daily basis.  It's another perspective.  It helps me live twice as long because I live my dreams as well as my waking experiences.  The best symbol to embody this wisdom I know is the Yin/Yang, the great Balance.  That is who we are: Spirit/Physical.   It's not opposites that are either/or; it is compliments that are best in equilibrium, in a constant dance of balance.  The relationship between Yin and Yang is the dance of Life.  Living aware of our waking and dream experiences is a reflection of this equilibrium.

The most important thing is to stop putting mommy/daddy responsibility on whatever Mystery it is that makes us tick and take responsibility for using the tools we are each born with to solve the problems that confront us here in the physical.  In other words, as Ecclesssiastes aptly stated, "Naked I'm born into this world, and naked I will depart."  You take nothing from the physical, but you can develop so much understanding to take with you!  There is always help available in a dream practice.

I've found my way to so many soul answers in dreaming, very few in listening unquestioningly to others.  I've also found so much in books, or film, or art or dance. I see my task to live from the heart and do as much as I can for myself and others, in balance.  But one very important thing is to pay attention to my dreams and to respect that the dreams of others can only truly be interpreted by the dreamer, her or himself.

So, while maybe some of my tribe wants to fine dine, I want to hear about people's dreams.  Does that mean I don't enjoy fine dining with them?  Of course I do; it's awesome food shared in love.  But I also enjoy how we talk about things more intimately in person and how my topics never fail to come up, eventually.

"My dreams are weird; I don't dream except sometimes."  So are everyone's dreams weird from the perspective of waking paradigms. When you look through the lens of dreaming as an experience, however, you recognize that the laws of the physical may not apply in many dream scenarios.    And as I love to say when someone tells me they can't remember their dreams, "Well, do you want to?"

It's the new year.  We're in a shit-load of confusion.  As former president, Barack Obama, suggests, what are you going to do about it?  We feel small, powerless to alter the big picture, but if the big picture includes our own journeys through this life and on into others, in other dimensions, then perhaps we can brave up and do whatever we can, however insignificant we deem it to be, to help make it better for others, as well as for ourselves, before we inevitably move on.

The art of dreaming always involves a correlation to the art of living a waking life; it's up to each of us to create the lives on both sides, the spiritual and the physical, that we truly want.  I say the spiritual first because without a spiritual anchor, we tend to seriously drift on the oceans of existence.

However, if we let ourselves be tethered with fear and inhibitions, hate and hopelessness, we'll miss our opportunity this time around to contribute something useful to the expansion of the spirit in the physical and the salvation of this planet.  Religions barter in salvation, but when I say salvation, I mean in the physical sense, as in survival rather than extinction on this beautiful planet Earth.  Otherwise, I don't have much to fear, and I devote a lot of my time to understanding my spiritual existence, because my dreams are a window to my soul.

The most important thing is that we are eternal beings, because we are, not because we have to earn it.  We also have nothing to fear but for the damage we can do to ourselves in self-hate.  A social/psychological paradigm that includes original despicableness (sin) is not a good place, psychically, from which to live.

You will die.  I will die.  What we believe about death will color everything we do in life.  Dreaming is our spiritual companion all of our lives long.  We're not born into ignorance, abandoned by our inner resources and beholding to some mercurial male deity.  We're born eternal; we probably asked to be here.  We are responsible for everything we do; we have a connection to spirit, that which we are, that cannot be broken.