A Toast to Giordano Bruno

Today is the anniversary of the martyrdom of Renaissance philosopher, Giordano Bruno.  I learned about Brother Bruno, a one time Dominican monk from Naples, Italy who died on this day in the year 1600, watching the pilot episode of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" hosted by the very likeable astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.  I appreciate the way professionals like Tyson or Brian Greene can make complex studies in physics or cosmology accessible to an interested layperson such as myself, as well as, how good production can make these subjects richly entertaining.

I was delighted by the animated vignette in this episode, “Standing Up in the Milky Way” that introduced me to a philosophical explorer, a contemporary of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, whose contribution to the understanding of our physical universe was every bit as radical and revealing as that of his famous peers.  Bruno taught that he agreed with Copernicus, the earth was not the center of the universe, it revolved around the sun, but he went much further by proposing that the sun is only one of an infinite number of stars orbited by any number of other planets which perhaps nurture life, as does our sun and earth. But what really made me sit up and take notice was when Tyson explained how Bruno came to his theory of infinite galaxies. 

“And then when he was thirty, he had the vision that sealed his fate.  In this dream, he awakened to a world enclosed inside a confining bowl of stars. This was the cosmos of Bruno’s time. He experienced a sickening moment of fear, as if the bottom of everything was falling away beneath his feet.  But he summoned up his courage.”

We watch as the animated Bruno character lifts the curtain and crawls out into a gloriously expanded landscape of the universe.  He extends his arms and takes flight; then we hear the character speak for himself:

“I spread confident wings to space and soared toward the infinite, leaving far behind me what others strained to see from a distance. Here, there was no up.  No down.  No edge.  No center.  I saw that the Sun was just another star.  And the stars were other Suns, each escorted by other Earths like our own. The revelation of this immensity was like falling in love.”

Giordano Bruno, I realized, arrived at his brave heretical view of the cosmos through dreaming, perhaps, very likely, in an out-of-body experience or a lucid dream.  He awoke with that clarity of understanding that such dreams inspire; the experience was more real than anything in the physical dimension and it transformed him completely into an evangelist for a new vision of heaven and earth, one that unfortunately got him tortured and burned as a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church.

Tyson wraps this fascinating segment on Bruno with these words:

“Giordano Bruno had planted the seed.  Ten years after Bruno’s martyrdom, Galileo first looked through a telescope, realizing that Bruno had been right all along—the Milky Way was made of countless stars invisible to the naked eye, and some of those lights in the sky were actually other worlds. Bruno was no scientist.  His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess, because he had no evidence to support it…”

Alas, Bruno, it was “only a dream.”

I did some research with the hope of finding the actual account of Bruno’s dream in his own words and still haven’t found it.  But I did discover that the episode ignited some controversy around Bruno’s story. None of the detractors took exception with Cosmos’ depiction of how Bruno arrived at his paradigm shattering theory of infinite universes; they all agree it was in dreams. They just don’t think the program should have implied he was a martyr for science.  According to several critiques, he was really martyred for denying the truth of certain core Catholic doctrines. And, I guess, that makes a hell of a lot of difference?

Here’s an example by Dr. Danny Faulkner in an article entitled “Cosmos Grossly Mischaracterized the Heretic Giordano Bruno”

“So, was science also the problem with Bruno? Hardly. Bruno was a mystic, arriving at his ideas through dreams. Eventually he saw his dreams as trumping the authority of Scripture, as well as the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, of which he supposedly was a member. Even though the Cosmos episode repeatedly depicted Bruno as believing that he was simply exploring God’s creation, if Bruno even believed that God created the world, Bruno’s god was very different from the God of the Bible. Bruno rejected basic doctrines of Christianity such as the trinity, the Virgin Birth of Jesus, the deity of Jesus, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. And these are just a few of the more jarring problems with Bruno; there are many other problems. Ultimately, it was these heretical ideas that got Bruno into trouble with the Roman Catholic Church. Given that, it was amazing that it took the Roman Catholic Church eight years to execute Bruno. We do not advocate or condone punishing anyone for their beliefs about either religion or science. However, the producers of Cosmos ought to be honest and clear about the reasons why Bruno was condemned rather than making him a poster-child for supposed visionary scientists who disagree with religious authorities.”

I’m deeply sorry that Brother Bruno, because he had the misfortune of living during a tyrannical theocracy, died a horrible and lonely death for ideas, both scientific and spiritual, that were centuries ahead of his time. What is incredibly exciting to me is that the real cutting edge of Bruno’s contribution is barely recognized, even today.  In dreams, we can make discoveries that translate into waking reality; scientific discovery can come of dreaming and be tested in dreaming.

Here’s how William Buhlman explains it in his book, “Adventures Beyond the Body”:

“All of us are interdimensional beings currently focusing our attention upon a single dimension of energy-matter.  Out-of-body and near-death experiences, dreams, altered states of consciousness, even death itself are evidence of our multidimensional nature. Consciously recognizing and personally experiencing our nonphysical nature is a major step in our individual evolution.  Eventually all of us will evolve to the point where we are able to consciously experience and explore the entire universe.  This will occur when our species grows to recognize that we and the universe are the same – multidimensional.

The New Frontier of Science

In the twenty-first century, science will recognize that the answers to the elusive physical mysteries of our existence—the cosmology of the universe, the unseen nature and structure of matter, the evolution of our species, and even the existence of life after death—can be found only by exploring the unseen substructure of the universe. This recognition will be a major evolutionary step of science and a turning point in human evolution. Slowly we will move from being an externally focused, biological species to being an increasingly multidimensional species. This process of change has already begun. Astrophysicists, quantum physicists, and particle physicists are even now conducting extensive experiments that support the concept of a multidimensional universe. This trend will continue throughout the twenty-first century.

Once we begin to explore the interior of the universe, a new age of scientific research and discovery will emerge. Modern science will expand its current observations of matter and reality beyond all current concepts. Science will begin to explore the unseen source of physical energy and matter. As we evolve, we will begin to chart the unseen universe much as astronomers are now charting the visible universe. The exploration of the interior of the universe is a massive endeavor reaching far beyond our current intellectual concepts of time, space, and energy. The exploration of the unseen dimensions is a task that all of us will eventually confront, for it is our birthright and our destiny to explore beyond our primitive biological vehicles and experience the magnificence of our true home within the multidimensional universe.”

It seems to me that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science, a martyr for individual spiritual authority and a martyr for conscious dreaming.  I take a moment to thank the stars for his life and his work.  I’m very glad he lived so courageously the path his dreams challenged him to live, despite the consequences, and I hope that if he chooses another physical life, it goes a lot easier for him.

Image: Flammarion Woodcut 1888
             Wikimedia Commons

In Dreams We Learn To Fly

Videographer, James Cookman

As I mentioned earlier, I was confirmed this past weekend in my belief that dreams are fascinating and that many people find them so

I see dreams as the zip line of the soul, how we’re connected to where we came from and where we’ll go after we shuffle off the proverbial mortal coil.  Our culture as a whole ignores dreams, unless it’s in therapy or analysis, where dreams are usually surrendered meekly to the “experts” for interpretation.  Many people feel that dreams “mean” something psychological, many fear dreams in a vague way. Either through religious association or Hollywood distortion, lots of people shut the door on the dreaming experience. 

Since both dreaming and sex are a totally natural and ubiquitously human experience, I’m amazed at the number of people who remain inexperienced on purpose, like celibate dream virgins.  But all kidding aside, my fire pit waking dream of last weekend just confirmed for me that people love the possibility of connecting to their dreaming and I'm happy to offer that to them as a dream teacher, especially because AD is such a “juicy” avenue for dream exploration.

Active Dreaming (AD) developed by Robert Moss frees dreaming from the constraints of a purely psychoanalytic perspective.  Reaching back into the ancient past, blending indigenous wisdom with Western cultural ideas and weaving it all with the best of modern dreamwork, AD is a practice, not a theory.

Robert teaches how the ancient Egyptians viewed a dream as a place the spirit body visits, how the Egyptian word for dream actually means to awaken; in AD, a dream can be a place and the dream a memory of an experience in that place, like a postcard. Dream Re-entry, one of the main practices of AD, teaches the dreamer that a dream can be expanded and explored in a wide awake relaxed conscious state.  I often write my re-entry adventures along side the dream that inspired them in my journal, they’re that good.

So when my new young friend this weekend tells me that she often dreams about the same intriguing spot, sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not, I see this “place” in her dreams for myself as a launch pad for consciously re-entering the dreamworld in a state of relaxed attention and continuing whatever dream adventure I choose in my imagination.

William Buhlman is a contemporary leader in the field of “Out of Body” or OBE experience. Although he's a master of OBE experience, many others, myself included, have experienced a conscious OBE at least once.  For many like me, it creates an absolute certainty of the capacity of our consciousness to survive physical death and of the diversity and complexity of experience on other planes of existence that are "non-physical."

For me the practice of AD spans the entire spectrum of dreaming: sleep dreams of ordinary life minutia that might prove helpful in managing routine waking events; unexpected numinous dreams heralding life changing events or shining a beacon through the turmoil; lucid dreaming where I'm aware of my dream self dreaming and my ability to shape dream realities and OBEs, where I experience my consciousness outside of my body either in sleep or meditation and consciously explore the multiverse that I know to be as solid a reality as any other I live.  These experiences have taught me to be the authority of my own life, now and after death, to determine my priorities accordingly and to fear death way less, rather, to use it as my ally instead. 

In AD, the only authority of a person's dreams is that person, not me, regardless of how much I know about and love dreaming.  Being my own spiritual authority is incredibly freeing.  Someone who is trying to interpret another’s dreams is just projecting their own understanding, which is fine, as long as they own that projection by saying “if it were my dream” in preface and only using the personal pronoun when discussing thoughts on that other person's dream.  It seems a simple guideline but I’ve seen how very powerful it is in practice.

For instance, regarding the dream my new friend told me which I mention above, I’d say, "if this is my dream" I’d call on my imagination to take me there someday when I have the leisure to daydream or some night when I can't sleep.  I’d pay close attention to what I see, just as if I were looking around in a waking world wooded area.  But here’s an important difference, if I felt unsafe at any point, I’d call in one or more allies to have my back and fearlessly continue with my exploration.  Dream practice has taught me to use my imagination for my own good, which believe it or not, is a rare thing in our contemporary culture.

The negative scenarios and narratives that we entertain regularly in our inner dialogue are less than healthy for us.  I’ve adopted the habit of stopping myself and asking, “Really?  Is this the story I want to tell myself? How does it serve me?”  Thanks to the wonderful work of Eckhart Tolle, more people are aware of how the ego, the “I” we speak of and usually identify with, creates unnecessary drama, pain and stress for us.  Dreaming connects us with who we are beyond the ego, what Jung called the Self. Dreaming is organic spirituality for that very reason, there’s much more to us than meets the “I”.

A dream practice can be whatever an individual wants it to be, though keeping a journal and recording your dreams, frequently or infrequently, is key, as dreams are ephemeral.  Think how looking through a photo album recalls life experiences and people for us. It’s the same with your dream journals, only more important because we’re dealing with experiences in the Unconscious, as Jung puts it, or according to Robert Moss, in the Multiverse. Waking reality experienced in a “conscious” state gets forgotten; experiences in the “Unconscious” are harder to recall if we don’t record them asap.

So, I invite you to allow dreaming more space in your life and perhaps double your life experience. Open your awareness to who you are dreaming, to what you do and what you learn. Step into your dream world with curiosity, focus and not a little awe.  Begin with whatever dream comes to mind, old or new, write it down; dreams are timeless because time is only relevant in the physical. Give the dream a title as if were a story.  Notice your feelings and champion your own cause; you are the ultimate creator of this story, so take charge.  Nothing can harm you in the dreamworlds unless you let it harm you, and even then, you’ll bounce back if you try. 

I always add a note about PTSD dreams which often repeat psychic wounding from physical trauma. A person who suffers from PTSD nightmares may need a healer with dream skills to help them transform their negative dream experiences. Nightmares, which are common to human experience, can be a stepping stone to personal growth when approached through a practice like Active Dreaming and other wonderful experiential paths of dreaming.

As Robert likes to say: “We were born to fly, and in dreams we discover that the soul has wings.” 

Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

Once I dreamt my exit strategy.  In my dream, I’m told that this dream landscape would make a good place to enter as I’m physically dying. In my dream, there’s a lovely woman, a guide of light assuring my safety.  And the drums are calling me to dance.

Needless to say, this is a dream I value highly; it’s a gift to me because it’s one way I can choose to play out my death experience. My spirit crossing, “shuffling off this mortal coil” can happen like this if I want it to. In this dream, I’m given the map to that country that so intrigues us as humans and I’m given an exit strategy through a dream portal I can re-enter in order to familiarize myself with the plan, the landscape and my options, NOW.  I don’t have to wait, in fact, just like buying the guidebooks to Hawaii before I went there, anticipation and some scouting ahead is part of the fun of the trip. 

Though many people still don’t want to think or talk about death, we on this planet, at this time are starting to evaluate old paradigms and open to new ones in record numbers. We’re blessed with some extraordinary teachers of these paradigm shifts and the books they’ve given us. There is a growing community of people deep in spiritual exploration; perhaps we will dream a new dream for humanity in time to restore this beautiful earth to it’s natural state of living vibrancy.  Perhaps that’s why we’ve chosen to incarnate at this time.

I’m not negating that death, like birth, can be messy and painful.  I wish us all a smooth exit at the right time.  I don’t claim to have conquered every fear of death, but I also came into this life kicking and screaming.  Both ends seem to have some pain factor involved.

In this magic moment in time, a  new spiritual consciousness is emerging, and the extensive dream and spiritual exploration blossoming this past half century are key contributors.  Dreaming practices open avenues of exploration to any human being willing to pay attention to her/his own dreaming. As Robert Moss puts it, “Dreaming is the science of soul for the 21^st century.”

Many people, across the globe, are arriving at a new human paradigm that sees each of us responsible for his or her own soul journey through dense matter, through this physical plane.  We are finding that turning inward, experiencing dreaming and the dream worlds have made us our own ultimate authority on the meaning of life and has eased, if not erased. all mortal fears.  

Dreaming isn’t the only science positing a new heaven and a new earth; contemporary theoretical physics also points to  a multiverse hidden within the one we observe as reality.  William Buhlman gives a wonderful and succinct overview of the most revolutionary physicist’s views in, Adventures Beyond the Body and draws exciting parallels to OBE experiences he’s had or researched in his sweeping surveys of OBEs around the world. 

We live as entities of energy in the multiverse.  The best way to see this is true is to pay attention and participate in your dream life equally with your waking life.  This simple avenue of proof is what we’re born with, a gateway home through the multiverse, a place before birth and after death.  A continumm of my existence, not a stagnant malignant restricting place, a place of possibility, free of the density of matter.

In dreaming, we experience, to varying degrees, depending on our own focus, the multiverse of non-physical realities that physics say exist and that dreaming says are the landscapes of our infinite non-physical existence. In these realms, energy generated by intention, thought, emotion, unconscious factors and consensus matters a great deal; it’s important to be clear about what you want and open hearted.  Those energies get you into the best places.

What about Heaven and Hell? Religious paradigms, literally man made, mental constructs, what the famed mystic poet William Blake labeled, “mind-forged manacles.”  Religions demand adherence to non-experientially based belief, often called “faith.”  Has anyone else noticed that religions, especially hard boiled, my way or the highway patriarchal religions in the world today are kind of ruining it for everybody? Having violent, jealous gods is getting old; having women reduced to chattel again is not an option in my hymnal.  Religions are causing a lot of trouble.  I myself am looking forward to being popeless, if just for a few weeks. Authoritarian belief based systems are the dinosaurs that smash spirituality, but we are living in a consensus paradigm that has the potential to become post-religion and truly spiritual. 

Organic spirituality, dreaming, isn’t based on a belief system, it’s based on experience in the dreaming and in the waking.  Each person is his or her own authority.  What I know to be true is what I’ve experienced myself in the dream worlds and in waking life, the physical and the non-physical.  And I’m not alone in this consensus; all over the world, people are waking up to the power of dreaming and the spiritual reality of our planetary existence on earth, the physical realm. 

At this moment on earth, we’re blessed with many wonderful teachers and their written works. It’s a spiritual explorer's dream come true to learn from dreaming pioneers like Robert Moss, William Buhlman, Patricia Garfield, Gayle Delaney – so very many more, as well as  from dreamers on the internet. My primary resource is my own dream experience…when I lay me down to sleep, I open a window and fly through it…I’m free.  Yes, not all dreams are pretty and sometimes they're hard to retrieve, like shadowy ghost images fading as I call them back.  But dreams are the royal road to inner-spaces.  Once you build a relationship with your own dreams, you see the bridge before you, there and back again.

“To be or not to be…”, if that’s the question it helps to know, based on the empirical evidence of my own experiences and those of countless others, that the physical event of death is a transition very much like the physical event of birth, that I’m turning the page, transforming my reality.  Maybe it’s not death where is your sting, because it definitely can hurt, but it appears death’s sting is fleeting compared to the rest of what I’ll experience. Death be kind, give me a good transition, but I don’t fear what Hamlet did “….for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” Bring those dreams on! I'll have new opportunities; the I that is spirit, energy, consciousness will endure in the most interesting ways, depending on where I am in my quest when I cross.  This holy grail of attaining spiritual awareness, becoming Conscious as Eckhart Tolle puts it,  just might be more important than making it in business.  It doesn't preclude financial success, but if all that survives death is who we are and not what we have, some balance would seem wise in preparation for the inevitable.

Based on his OBE experience and research, William Buhlman asserts unequivocally that we’re eternal spirits having a physical experience, each for individual reasons, determined to enter this physical external plane with something to accomplish.  What he describes resonates with many of my own experiences in dreaming.  This empirical spirituality offers me a great alternative to fear based, reward for towing the line, religions.  Dreaming offers a portal into my authentic being and teaches me what I'm really here on this amazing gorgeous planet to do.  Religions that insist on incinerating everybody on principle should be carefully assessed, as should those that have not protected children nor served LOVE.  I think the big 3 need to stand trial in this modern world. Ancient and indigenous spiritualities honored dreaming as a vehicle between worlds, always; they still have much to teach us.  Father obsessed religions of the last 6 thousand years or so don’t serve us as human beings, nor do they serve the planet and the future of our children.

Dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious and through the gates of death into the new, extended adventures available to each and every one of us.  This knowledge shines a very different light on “old age” death and the after life.  Instead of a decline of all that’s important to me, a loss and a disconnect, I can experience my old age as a new chapter and an opportunity to look ahead and take control of my journey. 

Shakespeare’s brooding prince Hamlet peered into death’s abyss hoping for solace from his earthly woes, but stopped short of doing himself in with his bare bodkin when an existential question occurred to him: “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?"  Fearing dreams, he was unprepared for death.  He was also cut off from his spiritual options; it would take several more centuries for the doors of dreaming to open the doors of death again.  But it’s happening.  What dreams may come?  What dreams do you want to realize?

The other day I had one of those conversations, okay, yes with a man, that’s heavily mental; they call it “reason, logic” and back it up with quotes from whatever dead author they believe nailed the truth in some pithy tome.  My sense is that whatever teachers I read and admire are my predilections; I don’t expect anyone to genuflect when I name them. I am not the authority over someone else’s waking dream or night dream.  After letting him spin out for a while, I held his paradigm of a dystopic, depleted future ruled by man’s technology gone awry before him, summarizing it briefly and asked him, is this the future you want to see happen, the one you want to bequeath your sons?  No, it's not.

Though being cynical may make us feel intellectually superior, in the long run, I think it’s dangerous.  There is a great deal of energy in a passionately held thought or belief and this carries energy that manifests into reality. When large numbers of people hold these negative beliefs, well...  We don't have to deny the obvious problems to adopt a passion for solutions instead of resigning ourselves to fear.  If thought is a form of creative energy, what we think matters.  Personally, If I’m conscious that my death will not end anything, that I’ll pick up in some way from where I left off, then I want to make sure that I like where I’m picking up from and where I left off.  That’s something I can do right now, prepare for death by living in the light I want to behold when I die and by dreaming the future I want to see happen, not the one I fear. 

Preparing for death means living a life that flows from waking into dreaming realities in a natural, openhearted and curious way.  Of all the wonderful acquisitions I can manifest on this physical plane, the ones I can take with me are the product of my own searching, my own experiencing in the physical waking world and the non-physical dreaming dimensions. Unlike Hamlet, I choose to stick around not because I fear death, but because I came here for a reason.  I have a job to do, something I signed on to do.  When I’m done, then I’ll cross over; and when I cross over, I’ll continue it on another level.

For me, I’d be happy enough to have helped foment a spiritual jail break, “setting all the captives free” seeing all those paradigm prisons dissolve and humanity turn a new leaf. A dream fueled spirituality will allow more of us to have fun in this dimension, resting in the secure knowledge, born of experience, that we are not alone and that we are each eternal spirits.

 Although religions parrot this, they put all sorts of imperatives and conditions on salvation and usurp individual spiritual authority.  The ancient poet Ecclesiastes wrote, “Naked came I into this world and naked I shall return.” We each come and go, the experience is individual, natural and safe, but we make that crossing on our own. The most universal dream report I hear is about a beloved departed person visiting the loved one in the dreaming and assuring them they’re ok.   Wish fulfillment?…nah-ah. I’ve seen too many eyes sparkle and hearts open telling me about when dad, mom, child, beloved partner or even a cherished pet comes back in the dreaming to give their reassurances or make their requests.  It is organic spirituality’s portal through death, the dreaming, a glimpse of non-physical realities.  

When you know through your own experience, your own dreaming, that death is a door that opens into a non-physical multi-verse, so what you attract to you by your attitude and desires will be your new environment when you walk through that door, it seems to me that you evaluate and adjust your passions and desires in order to attract the environment you want to live in forever.  I guess this is where good guys actually finish first. The Egyptians believed at death each person’s heart is weighed against a feather on golden scales, only a light heart will pass the test of eternity.

In my up-coming dream group, we’ll journey, as I’ve done in groups with Robert Moss, to the realm of Luna, the transition station where souls either incarnate or arrive after incarnation.  I look forward to hearing the stories each dreamer will tell of their adventures.  I look forward to exploring this realm again with a new group of travelers.  

The strongest thing we can do is to dream our best dreams for the highest good of all.  May it be so.