Dream Spirituality: the Divine in the 21st Century

"Full Moon In Taurus" by Katrin Haiba   2017

I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is in a shit load of trouble.  My best friend and partner, Jim, has taught me to distinguish between the world's situation and the people in it.  The trouble is incontrovertibly, the people.  The world, as Jim insists, is a beautiful place.

Why are people causing so much trouble, so much suffering for themselves and every living thing around them? Could it be that the people are acting out of misguided beliefs?

For all of  recorded history, not to be confused with actual history,  history is the story as told by the conqueror.  The conqueror's rule, the conqueror's dictums, the story as the conqueror sees it.  In a patriarchal paradigm, might makes right, strength is power and daddy knows best.  Patriarchy conquered about 6 millennia ago; Homo Sapiens, our clan, have been around for about 200,000 years.  Do the math; do you really think we came into our own only 6,000 years ago and sat around twiddling our thumbs before that? Archeological records suggest periods of human history resplendent with remarkable human works, and whats more, with respect for the Feminine Divine, God as Mother.

Today, can we recognize a failed paradigm when we're living it?

On this beautiful planet, patriarchal religions constructed the paradigm of violence and domination.  For the six millennia of father rule, patriarchies have been one blood bath after another.  The more rigid the tenets of the patriarchal belief structures, the worse women in that culture fare.  Restrictions on everything female are a hall mark of these paradigms.  "And he shall lord it over her" because she is at existential fault for all things evil.  You can call her Eve, make sure she stays in her place or she will deceive and subdue you.

But there was a time when we emerged, wide-eyed from our caves and proclaimed the Divine Mother.  It was a simple deduction.  Who gives birth?  Who bleeds and does not die?  The Great Mother is not Barbie dressed as the Virgin Mary; the Great Mother is the primal creative force of the Universe.

The problem with problem paradigms is, as you think, so shall you do.  If society can get us to accept absurdity as the norm, even the goal, through the crap they teach you is true, when it isn't, then that particular consensus reality can rule.  Patriarchy is a physical earth consensus reality that I think is way past its use by date.

Men don't have to feel threatened; they just have to open their hearts to the Feminine Divine, think with their hearts more and join the revolution.  The opposite of patriarchy isn't matriarchy; the patriarchal paradigm rules by hierarchies and force.  The opposite of patriarchy is balance - harmony, dance, and chill living.  Anyone want to sign up for a new paradigm?

Thinking is dangerously arbitrary; a paradigm that dictates inane, insane beliefs, especially about women for the benefit of men, also justifies the subjugation of one race to another.  It all begins with the hubris to make rules that handicap to any degree the natural potential of a person, whatever gender, whatever race.

Isn't it time we took stock of the wineskins into which we pour the truest elixirs of our soul?  God is not male or father.  God/Goddess is All.  Light. Energy.  Way too big for those tiny, stiff foreskins, I mean wineskins.

Haven't you met the divine in your dreams?  It doesn't always take the same form. Sometimes it's surprising or humbling to recognize our initial blindness to the shape the divine does take in our dreams, but when we become aware, we know it by the awe it inspires in us.  Your divine and my divine will not manifest the same.

Yet, from the time we're born, we're told god is Father, mighty, to be feared and to be catered to, regardless of how callous, cold and petty vengeful his actions often prove to be.  Take the principal sacrifice at the heart of patriarchal Christianity, that of the only, the good, loving son who must die to settle a debt.

How can a religion that claims god is love also insist that something so unnatural, horrible and cruel as demanding your own son's gory death to satisfy a sour tempered grudge is ultimately an act of selfless love for humanity?  But then again, how many sons have been sacrificed in any of those bloodbaths that are just the way patriarchy rolls.

Why has the Divine Mother been forgotten or relegated to the handmaid who'll do whatever the Father says?  It is no accident, as I've written, but the question for today, for the 21st century is, how much longer is an untenable spirituality going to rule us?  How much longer will people listen to religious babble and consider it the word of the one, almighty, all male, god?  Isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

If, as I've mentioned, our spirituality is as natural and individual to us as our bellybuttons, why not tune in to the channel you frequent every night and find out more about who you really are from your own direct connection?  Does that mean that we share nothing?  No, as it turns out, we soon learn that we share everything.  We are One.

Try seeing the divine in Mother as well as Father, equally; the yin and the yang is the great balance that makes life flow.  Try keeping an ear to your own best counsel of your dreams so that you come to realize you live in more than one place at once; the dream world and the physical world are equally, if differently, real.

Our differences are based not on physiology but on beliefs.  It's our belief that separates one from another, sometimes breeding real hatred.  Look at the racial hatred in vogue now; how stupid are these beliefs?  Many people can concur that they are; then how stupid is the belief in one supreme, male deity who wants anyone who doesn't agree to die a horrible, long painful death and forever burn in putrid fires for eternity.  Nice.

Dreaming is just one avenue to the spirituality that can liberate us of old, mean and dangerous beliefs. I heard Neal Degrasse Tyson call his version, cosmic spirituality.  We all don't have to arrive at the same conclusions nor follow the same paths; but we all have to find true balance so that we don't continue to rock the boat so violently ( the planet) on which our survival depends

There is no mistaking Love.  It doesn't restrict, punish nor demand.  It flows with what is needed most for the wellbeing of the soul. Love is ineffable and best experienced directly, so why not tune in to your own connections and open your heart to greater possibilities?

I didn't need to give up Jesus to give up patriarchal christianity; Jesus is the best feminist role model for men in patriarchal history.  The divine feminine is equally important to our psychic health as the divine masculine.  A divine masculine out of control is bad for you, a fact that history bears out repeatedly.  For spiritual balance the divine feminine must exert equal influence in the human psyche and the cultures we create.  Divine Love is a Dance.  We're here to dance, or at least let our hearts do it for us.

Waking Life/Dream Life

A participant in one of my workshops wrote down a question about whether we repeat our daily experience in the dreaming.

Yes, I think so from my dream experiences, but there always seems to be a twist. Even though the characters of my waking life, in person and from TV, may show up in a dream because they figured in my day; there's always more to it, and it's personal.

My dreams will throw me a bone sometimes in the way of wisdom for my waking life; but they aren't that interested in the physical life I'm living; they are partial to the life of the soul.

What's sad to me is that most people automatically think, oh religion.  Christian, Muslim, Judaism or Buddhism, that's where one goes to plug into the life of the soul.  No, wrong.    That's where you go to get told what to believe and how to save something that doesn't need saving.  The Soul saves, it doesn't need saving.  Dreams are the Soul's messengers.

Some people think "spirituality" is all OM and Amen.  Spirituality is whatever you do with an open heart and selflessness.  Like dreams, that come big and small, so does spirituality.  And I don't think you can enter into true spirituality without a sense of humor, which leaves most religions out.

So, our dreams are focused on spiritual growth over winning the lottery, which often means we get even more lost than we already are into the physical.  Dreams bring us the messages that help us let go of rigid, silly or unloving ways, not just towards others, but towards ourselves.

Let's face it; if you get told from day one by your culture that some Nobadaddy was pisssed with you from the minute you hit the physical because your ancestors disobeyed, therefore, you must spend a lifetime making it up to Him.  What?  This dude even insists His one and only son die for the cause.  Jesus.  Who needs a god like that?

Dreams remind us that the Divine has many faces, and sometimes it has no face at all; just Light, just Being.  Many of you dreamers know just what I mean.  After one experience I wrote about here, I came back saying, "I'll never be able to explain this to anyone, not even myself."

Isn't it better to experience spirituality than to be told what to believe?  There is no language for the Truth that Is, you've got to experience it yourself.  Luckily, not only are we born with belly buttons, we're born with the power to dream.

So, back to how dreams mirror an experience in waking life to us, day life; yes, it can seem mundane repetition, but play with it a bit anyway.  Write it down, ponder it from time to time.  Let yourself say, huh; yes, that thing happened yesterday and that person I saw or spoke to, that was the movie I watched, the fight I had, etc. but there are some very interesting other things in the dream; it's not an instant replay.  Sometimes I have to wade through the repetition of a dream before it clicks, but life's lessons are best learned both in sleep and wake.  If both sides agree; I'm in good shape, at least spiritually.

My spirituality is like my bellybutton, mine.  It doesn't need a credo, or ask allegiance of me.  It never harms my wholeness.

Look at women's situations because of patriarchal religious dogma and tell me those misogynous edicts don't harm women, sometimes body and soul.  Eve; really?  Check out my Howling Mary dream and my posts about the Great Mother.  There was a time when these crazy religions didn't rule and we, as a human race, were just not that crazy.

Dreams are still our lifeline, though many hold that line with lots of slack.  When people ask me why they don't remember their dreams, my first question is; do you want to?  Do you set an intention to dream before you go to sleep.  Do you take the time in the morning to gather whatever you can from the dreaming?

Yes, we see lots of parallels to waking life in dreaming; it's up to us to notice the differences, the new elements our dream has added, the challenge our dream is presenting.  We don't learn from being told; we learn from experience.  There's great wisdom in how dreams handle us; it's up to us to recognize it.

Each of us is going to die.  There are few things we'll carry across that transition with us, but they are the best things we can have on either side of the divide.  Who and what we truly, selflessly love, what we do for others, and how much we learn to truly, madly, deeply love ourselves.

There are huge obstacles to self love; it's ironic that we have such supreme ultimate narcissists right now on the global stage, keeping us cowering every second possible with war threats and closed hearts. I lay that obstacle square at the feet of the patriarchal paradigm of the last 6,000 years; and I propose that once we discover who we truly are as spiritual beings having a physical existence, those mind-forged manacles will fall.

Dreams matter whether they're mundane or mind-blowing, whether we know we left our body and are in the dreaming or we don't.  Wether we have one dream a year, or a dozen a day.  They matter to each dreamer.  That's the bridge, the cord, the secret door to our souls, as Jung insisted.

So dream strong and pay attention.

Ashé!