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.

Compassion, As Taught to Me in Dreams

Compassion, what does it feel like to you?

To me, it's not pity or "feeling sorry for", because that's like looking over the railing at someone's demise, sad for them, glad it's not me.  Compassion acts and takes risks on behalf of the other person; compassion finds some life line to throw.

We're more compassionate of others when we know ourselves well enough to need compassion from our own harsh self-judgements.

Jesus, with his usual astuteness, put it this way; don't judge the mote in someone's eye until you remove  the plank in your own.  It's easy to see the bits of personal rubbish in others; rare, it seems, for folks to see their own garbage.

It's much harder to be judgmental of others if you're aware and responsible for your own shadow. The more compassionate we are in the face of our shadows, the better we see others with compassion.  

Finding compassion in ourselves involves hatching out of the hard shell that is Ego and living in the physical, but connected to spirit.   Once I became aware, through dreaming, that my physical body and dreaming body are separate aspects of the consciousness I call me, I opened the magic doors to living in two realms, in one lifetime.  Dreams matter as much as things that happen during waking matters; it's me in both places.

Dreams are the most compassionate teachers I've known.  I like to use the phrase, they've scared the pajamas off me, but even my greatest nightmares have turned into my sturdiest allies.  Dreams will shock you out of complacency, but when you have the courage to pay attention to dreams, despite hearing growing up, it's "just" a dream, you find your wisest and most trustworthy life teachers.

Who can afford to be compassionate?  The wise person who's found she or he has nothing to lose by loving.  The person who knows, this solid ground is only one side of the story. How do we know? Dream explorers are leading the way, as are the growing community of near death experiencers, between them, our age-old questions about death and the after life are being openly and compassionately addressed.

We're living in a time of great spiritual advances in inner exploration and we're also living in a time of great physical crisis.  Feels like some kind of divine irony.

Life is joy; without joy, we're dead inside.  There are many paths to joy through dreaming that can ease our suffering and give us the courage to ease the suffering around us.

The mindfulness movement is an exciting spiritual movement, as well; it's Buddhist thought harmonized with the best of current psychotherapies.  We're moving away from the sin driven, punishment/reward paradigms we've endured for centuries towards greater awareness of the complexity of spirit or consciousness.  Despite the external atmosphere of hate, separatism, violence. religiosity and fear, growing numbers of us are keying in to love and compassion as the engines of action.

Following dreams helps us see that all is not always what it seems.  This is one reason I call dreaming "organic" spirituality; we're born plugged in.  We may have unplugged that connection based on believing things we were told or on the lack of guidance available to help us navigate those sometimes choppy waters.  Helping children with nightmare fears can be an opportunity to show them how to address their fears creatively.

Independent spirituality through dreaming isn't something religious enterprises endorse because it could cost them memberships; memberships pay for their existence, often in the luxury to which they've become accustomed. The scientific establishment, for its part, has confined itself to materiality,  with the wonderful exception of Physics. Yet, more and more, people are finding themselves pondering the possibilities of new spiritual paradigms for themselves.  I thank Oprah for sparking pioneering spiritual thinking in mainstream culture.

The time is ripe for all of us to turn inward; drop-in, tune-in and pay attention.  There's a great deal to be gained.  One of those things is greater compassion for ourselves, others and the pickle we're collectively in on this earth dimension.

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

In a "USA Today" story recently, a woman reporter relates the Pope's opinion on women priests, which is No. She concludes:

"Women priests may not top his list, but perhaps Francis is serving women through his focus on global poverty and hunger. Is that enough?" Uh, no; it's not enough.

Theology professor Alice L. Laffey makes a similar point in her op-ed, saying: "Throughout the world, women and their children make up the greatest percentage of human beings living in destitution. Their main concern is not women priests but food, health, education and physical safety. Francis' genuine concern for the real lives of the poor and suffering warmly embraces women."

In other words, Francis is serving women through his focus on global poverty and hunger, because for some obscure reason, the majority of the world's poor are women and children.  So look how much he likes women; he's going to talk more about what they need and maybe see if he can get them some management positions in the Vatican, (although most Vatican positions of authority require high ranking clerical ordination).

Here's my take on Francis' position: The majority of the world's poor are women because women have no status in patriarchal government, in patriarchal religion nor as the Divine Archetype.  Patriarchy is an old fashioned word for men rule, make all the decisions concerning women and children and God looks like one of them, an old white guy.  In patriarchal paradigms, woman's power is stripped from her; consider that it's been less than 100 years since American women got the right to vote  If you wonder what it took to get the 19th Amendment passed, watch Hillary Swank's portrayal of Suffragist leader, Alice Paul in "Iron Jawed Angels."  You may have to close your eyes during the part where jailers force feed the prisoners on a hunger strike; it's gruesome.  But that's what our grandmothers had to do to get us the vote in this great country.  Now when do you think women in some Muslim nations, or in Orthodox Hebrew communities or in the Catholic Church will get equal rights? By the way, American women are not guaranteed equal rights under our constitution, as we somehow couldn't manage to pass the ERA.  

Women are poor because women are on a sliding scale of denigration in patriarchal cults around the world, so don't tell me that the head of one of the big 3 global patriarchal cults is doing enough for women by talking about how they are poor and need help.  By the way, I think he talks in general, about poor people, not poor women, but we all know how inclusive patriarchal language can be.

So then comes an interview in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Ash Wednesday, (the infamous time of penitence for Catholics that kicks off, wisely enough with Mardi Gras) with the Jesuit editor of the Catholic magazine, "America", James Martin.  Headline: "Women Could Have Greater Role in Church, Pope says." (Sorry, it's a little hard to watch with a straight face because he has a big black cross smudged in ashes on his bald pate.)

Gee whiz, I wonder what Pope Francis has in mind for our new roles in the church?  Ordination?  Making Pope Joan known to the world or apologizing and asking the church to do penance for the millions of victims. the majority women, of the bloody Medieval and Renaissance Roman Catholic Inquisition? Gee, what could the Pope have in mind, because he already said ordination is off the table because he doesn't want to see women "clericalized," huh?  Now that's sweet; he doesn't want to see us bothered with those long black robes and stiff white collars, but maybe we can run the Vatican equivalent of the PTA or go help the poor like Mother Teresa.  Besides, he says, we've talked about ordaining women in the Church before and decided against it; there's no need to revisit this pesky little subject.

Now, according to Father Martin, the Church has already said no because...(No, not because we don't have a penis like Jesus did, that wasn't the reason he gave), because if Jesus had wanted women to be priests, he would have started off picking one as an Apostle, which he didn't; so there, women can't be priests now.

OMG!  Did he just say that?  Despite the volumes of scholarly exegesis on John 20:11-21, in which Jesus appears first to Mary of Magdala on the third day after he's crucified? She doesn't recognize him  (most departed appear looking terrific and I'm sure that's not what she was expecting), until he says her name, and she knew him.  (Did they embrace?) "Don't cling to me" he says,  "because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and find the brothers and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my god and your god."  Jerusalem Bible

You see, the word "apostle" is derived from the Greek, "apostolos"; John wrote in Greek. It means messenger  or ambassador.  Now whom did the Lord choose as his first "messenger"?  To whom did He first appear, though Peter and the Beloved Apostle were duly fetched by Mary when she found the tomb empty.  Yeah, they searched around, found the linens and went running back to establish a religion based on artifacts.  Mary stuck around and was rewarded with the real thing; she was first to see the Risen Christ and the first to "take the message to the brethren, "Jesus is Alive.  He is Risen;" Mary of Magdala was first to proclaim this message.  The first Apostle to the Apostles was a woman, selected as his ambassador by Jesus himself.  She was also made a disciple by Jesus, (Luke 10: 38-42; since I know the good Father Martin might argue that one can't be an Apostle without first having been a disciple) the day she and her sister Martha were supposed to serve the food for the hungry dozen, but Mary was sitting there at Jesus' feet listening to Jesus teach.  Martha complained, but Jesus replied, "Mary has chosen what is better and it won't be taken away from her."  Did I mention that the word disciple is derived from the Greek word that means "to sit at the feet of a teacher" and that it was a crime punishable by death to defile the Torah (the holy Hebrew laws Jesus was purportedly teaching) by teaching it to a woman?  

Jesus was a Feminist; his treatment of women with respect and compassion probably contributed greatly to his condemnation by the religious authorities of his day. If he was running the RC today, we wouldn't be having this conversation, but he probably never intended the institutions that came after his death; he taught that "the kingdom of God is within you."  What's more, according to many ancient but non-canonical (meaning the RC won't credit their authenticity) texts, women had lots of authority in the early Church. Just one century into the "Christian Era, not so much.  How did that happen; ask Paul, a great proponent of keeping women silent and veiled.  

There are lots of skewed reasons for not ordaining women, beginning with the mythical fact that women are guilty from the get go; if it wasn't for Eve, we'd all still be living in paradise.   In reality, women threaten the very bedrock of the patriarchal RC church, that God is Male.  When I was a divinity graduate student and a candidate for priesthood in the RC through the "Women's Ordination Movement" of the 70's and early 80's, our motto was "New Women, New Church."  We weren't going to lie; you have sexist repressive dogma and we're here to take ink to that parchment and make some alterations.  For one, we will call God "Mother" as well as "Father" in recognition of the great historical and ancient Goddess traditions that were all but silenced by patriarchal brutality; we will bring back the full Divinity of the Feminine Archetype and represent that archetype in our priesthood. 

Okay, so it's no surprise we didn't get ordained; we were and are an open threat to the misogyny that has reigned too long. 

I can understand the Pope-u-larity of this pontiff; he's definitely a relief after the tight ass party line toters we've had recently, but he's got to walk the walk, not talk it.  Religious theater like foot and baby kissing doesn't do it; neither does unexpected papal humility, charm or ordering your own pizza. Francis says he can't change what Pope John Paul II (J2P2) said on the subject of Women's Ordination, despite that he's been contradicting that particular predecessor on other matters, like Gay inclusivity and letting divorced Catholics take communion.

"For now, though" the news reports, "Catholics have to settle for slow, subtle shifts, which, to give Francis credit, are already occurring."  

Really?  Why do women and men who support women's ordination have to settle for anything?  It's crucial I think to speak out now; there is no reason not to ordain women and every reason, including historical precedent to ordain them.  If Pope Francis wants to earn his picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone ("the thrill that will getcha when you get your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone." playing in the Vatican?), he needs to act to bring real balance not just to the Roman Catholic Church, but to the Modern Collective Psyche that cannot function, as Carl Jung warned, in such a state of disequilibrium without creating the collective psychosis we are clearly experiencing today.  Raise women to equal status with men, physically by ordaining them and psychically, by restoring the Divine Feminine.  If there was ever a Pope who could accomplish this, outside of John XXIII, it's Francis; I hope he wants to.  Let's all focus on sending him the message: "Ordain Women, Hail Mary, Save Humanity"

The Power of Your Dreaming Mind

Being a full time dream explorer means straddling two worlds.  Not in a split personality way that threatens to dissolve a healthy ego, but as a practice of balancing two realities.   We live in a multi-dimensional universe; physics and modern spiritual teachings agree.  This is most obvious when you follow a regular dream practice, remembering and journaling dreams frequently.  After countless dream experiences have provided significant help and teaching; a person realizes that waking reality is only one side of the existence coin. What we're learning as dreamers is that there is a way to balance these multi-realities so that the most feared hazard, loss of sanity, is not an issue.  As Jesus said, "render unto Caesar what belongs to Caeser." Pay attention to the waking world; take it seriously and do what you can.  But we are visitors here; each of our individual lives is much, much broader in experience and potential if we can accept who we are. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience, and not for the first time.  Every physical experience is rooted in the primal source of physical being, spiritual being.

The option a dream practice offers for living in this reality is to do it with respect, but without seeing it as the ultimate reality.  It isn't.  The ultimate reality is that we are forever and we are evolving.  Towards what; each of us decides.  My vote?  Towards beings who know that Love is the Answer.

I may be wrong.  If I am; I'll find out when I die.  If I'm not, then the best is yet to come!  And although I've reached this conclusion based on my own dreaming experience, countless respected modern scholars teach the same thing.  This is only one aspect of my journey, so I don't need to lose myself in it.  The perspective dreaming gives me is a life line in the fluid ocean of occurence that is physical existence and that life line is knowing that this is temporary - temporal.

The power of your dreaming mind is that it allows you to live life truly large, on many levels at once.  What happens during the waking day is no more or less important than what happens in my dreams.  Through my dream practice I can bi-locate, I can enjoy my waking adventures and I can live wonderful adventures in dreaming realities simultaneously, on a regular basis.  How much would you pay for that technology if Apple came up with it?

We are born with a powerful dreaming mind.  Humanity has always payed attention to dreaming, as depicted in dramatic cave paintings found in the south of France from some 40,000 years ago.  Humanity's dreaming can be traced back through every known ancient civilization; the Egyptians and the Greeks dedicated temples to healing through dreams.  Humanity's connection to dreaming was thrwarted for about the last 2,000 years, for reasons I've discussed before and no doubt will again.  Still, we haven't strayed far.  The gates of dreaming were held open by visionaries like Carl Jung.  Dreaming always brings us home again, and even during the most ignorant of those dreamless years, dreaming offered a portal to sanity to anyone who payed attention.

The power of the dreaming mind is that it requires little to tap into it; it's organic.  Each of us is born with the connection, each of us lives with that connection.  Some have been conditioned to view dreams as delusional and to be ignored, others believe they don't have time in their busy lives to pay attention to dreams, but everyone I've seen open to dreaming, changes that opinion quickly.  All it takes to realize the power of your dreaming is to pay attention to it. When we're acclimated to the "waking treadmill" of work, struggle, stress and entertainment, we can miss the option we have of altering that unilateral existence, if we want to.  Dreaming shines a light on the unconscious forces that drive us, sometimes controlling our egos; it helps us stay connected to our spiritual core, what Jung called the Self or some call the Higher Self.

Dreaming can take us into realms of magic and wonder.  If your dreams disturb you and educating yourself through good reading doesn't dispel that, then seek good professional help.  You'll know it's good help if it connects you to your dreams directly and doesn't tell you what your dream or your life mean.  The best teachers make you curiouser and curiouser; they don't give you answers.

As we experimentally open the doors to a dreaming awareness, we find that there's more to us than meets the I (the ego); we open ourselves to exploring the exhilirating reality of living on more than one dimension at once. Mono-dimensional thinking leads to limitation and depression; multi-dimensional thinking leads to engagement, adventure and hope.

I propose that the power of the dreaming mind is to liberate each of us from slavish thinking and negative projections; what you can dream, can exist in waking reality.  According to John Perkins, one valuable lesson he learned from the South American shamans who taught him is that "the world is as you dream it." The world, Perkins says, is as it is because someone dreamt it this way and others continue to consent in allowing that dream reality.  It just takes someone, or many, to dream it differently and transform what once was to what I want it to be.  That's the challenge of the dreaming mind.  Once we learn to use it; it's no longer confined to dreaming dimensions; it helps us create in waking reality, as well.