Angel Wings: Dreams & Grief

In the early 90s, I met a very dear friend of mine, the artist who taught me how to make jewelry.  We found, from the beginning, we had a lot in common; we could talk for hours.  I would often go to her house because she was a mother of three young children when I met her.  Her oldest child, a beautiful girl, was in a wheel chair and dependent on someone to do everything for her; she couldn’t communicate with words.  When she was born, the doctors said she wouldn’t survive.  Her mother felt very differently. 

When I met my friend, her daughter was seven.  The first time I met her, I took in the wheelchair to which she was confined and realized, my friend needs to be on 24 hour call, every day to care for her child.  Then I saw the way my friend related to her daughter; the love emanating between them was palpable. The patience and consideration and unquestioning love my friend showed her daughter left no doubt that this was not a burden, or a misfortune to be borne sadly.  ‘This is my daughter; this is what she’s like as a person, I love her completely,’ is what I read immediately in my friend’s words and actions.

I learned so much from the two of them.  It amazed me how much my friend was always herself, as well as a full-time mother.  She laughs and makes me laugh all the time; she’s a talented and tremendously motivated artist.  She loves everyone and treats everyone with kindness.  Her daughter was always her angel, her old soul; as she is now that she’s crossed over.

My friend’s beloved daughter died last week, peacefully in her sleep, at the age of 25, just before Mother's Day and her 26th birthday.  Although I hadn’t spoken to my friend for a few months, I called her immediately when I heard; my heart could imagine how torn hers must be at this moment.  I know she is happy for her daughter’s freedom, because she wrote the following poem, but I also know her mother’s heart is aching.  Here's her poem:

Angel Wings

I know it now that you are free.

For 25 years you were my 'little Lauren Lee"

So go...soar high and spread your angel wings.

Go now to do those thousand things.

For you are free now

To walk, dance, talk and sing.

It is beyond any words how much peace that brings.

My friend is a strong dreamer with a deeply felt spirituality; she already knows what solace listening to dreams can bring.  I’m so glad that dreaming is an open channel to her because communicating with our beloved departed in dreams is common place; dreaming bridges the divide between life in the body and life beyond it.

I write this as a tribute to my friend’s beautiful daughter who can at last use her voice to talk and laugh and sing and her legs to walk, run and dance.  I write it to vision her in her new freedom and to wish her well.  I write this to let her know that she is remembered, loved and respected.  I look forward to hearing all the wonderful stories my friend will tell me of her dreams, visions and communication with her daughter.  It’s how she says: “beyond any words how much peace that brings.”

It’s one thing to say "I believe in an afterlife”; it’s another to visit and explore that reality personally.  It’s easily done, but rarely sought.  Dreaming is, to say the least, undervalued, if not feared, in much of our Western culture, though, that’s changing.  Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to their dreams and who is willing to learn something about the worlds of dreaming from other dream explorers, can experience the certainty of soul survival after physical death for themselves.  Dreams of the departed are a pretty universal human experiences; why anyone would ignore this treasure is beyond me

We live in a time of countless reported Near Death Experiences (NDEs)  and spontaneous or intentional Out of Body journeys (OBEs); we’re familiar with shamanic journeying and meditation. Modern theoretical physicists suggest we inhabit a multi-dimensional universe of many parallel realities. Dream explorers will tell you that we have access to this multi-dimensional existence through our dreaming.  It’s organic; we were born with this access.  All we have to do is pay attention.

We come with a built in spiritual portal that enables us to look within.  For many though, their cultural norms and myths steer them away from direct spiritual experience towards religions that dictate what to believe and don't teach what can be experienced.

Once you experience the organic spirituality of your dreams, you don’t need anyone to tell you what you have to believe.  As Carl Jung himself put it at the end of his years when asked if he still believed in God; “Believe?  I don’t believe; I Know.”  The look on the great doctor’s face said it all; he beamed from within, his soul shining through his eyes, part wise man, part trickster. (bit I'm referring to starts at about 4:57)

Wouldn’t it be nice to know, once and for all, that there is Divine Love available to anyone who listens within?  Isn’t that just what Jesus said; the Kingdom of God is within?  I think he meant that literally.  If that’s the case; isn’t it just possible that although our conscious, ego driven minds rule when we wake, our unconscious connection to All That Is expands, and if we seek, we shall find when we sleep?

It will take time for my beloved friend to grieve her physical loss and all of us who love her deeply will be by her side to make sure she has whatever support she wants.  I know I’ll be privileged to hear many of her wonderful dreams, too.

And, in a beautiful synchronicity; here’s a message written to my friend’s daughter by a cousin when she signed the on-line guest book:


Dear sweet Lauren, 
Memories of your beautiful, smiling face and peaceful vibes will forever be in my heart. I dreamt of you last night. I played my violin for you while you were smiling and clapping. Thank you for visiting me in my dreams. You are and forever will be a pure, peaceful soul. We will all miss you dearly, but can be at peace knowing you are in a blissful world now. 
With all my love, 
-----

This beautiful spirit portrait of Lauren is by artist Lorette Gaboury-Massa, Lauren's mother and my dear friend.

The Freudian/Jungian Shadow Slip

I don’t have much use for Sigmund Freud and, yes, I’m a big Carl Jung fan, but I do credit Freud for noticing my favorite word synchronicity, the Freudian Slip. That’s when your ego says what your id was thinking instead of what your  super-ego told it to say.  This is usually very embarrassing for the ego.

Here’s one of my favorite FS moments from way back: 

I’m a young coed at a college mixer; there are grad students prowling around, looking for undergrads, I assume.  I meet this guy, good looking and pleasant who tells me he’s studying microbiology.   In true coed light-hearted banter I say, “Oh, you mean you study little orgasms…I mean organisms…” and then I burst out laughing.  There was just nowhere to hide.  I didn’t end up dating that guy, though we had a great conversation.

In my experience, Freudian slips are waking dreams in which the Trickster/ Shadow archetype is messing with me, and since the archetype concept belongs to Jung, I’ve renamed the phenomenon, the Freudian/Jungian Shadow Slip (FJSS) to credit him, as well. 

A waking dream in Active Dreaming is when you look at an event in waking life as if it were a dream and apply the same pondering observation to a waking reality that you would to a night dream.  So, having frequently recognized my Shadow archetype in dreams; I should know Her in waking.

It’s not as easy as it sounds because: a) the ego hates looking stupid, so it usually does a lot of damage control and/or rationalization to avoid looking at any undesired truth; and b) they don’t call it the UNconscious for nothing; what’s in the dark, stays in the dark, unless you shine a light on it. 

But, like night dreams, FJSS moments are opportunities to learn about myself.

As I understand Jung, an Archetype is the energy mold from which certain universal psychic realities flow into particular mythic or symbolic patterns. Cultures project consensus archetypes into myth and religion; we often project our individual archetypes into others. Dreams reveal what archetypes are ready to be integrated in the psyche, sometimes by mirroring some troubled aspect of our lives. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths”.

For Jung, the first step on the path to Individuation, is that a person must face the Shadow. I think this is what Pogo meant when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” (Individuation: that’s when your analyst gives you an A, kidding; it’s when a person has integrated all the cast off soul energies, restoring wholeness to the person and peace of mind.  I’d say it’s very like the Eastern concept of Enlightenment).

The Shadow has many manifestations; perhaps the most extreme is the archetype of evil, the devil. The Shadow represents what we reject about ourselves as unacceptable, and since it’s unacceptable to the egoic persona, we tend to unconsciously project our shadows on to others.  The devil, the enemy, the blasphemer, the person I just can’t stand, whose faults just drive me crazy, the person who is different, race, gender, nationality, the list is fairly long.

The main element of the Shadow is that it’s hidden, the ego hasn’t got a clue that it’s there; but, says Jung, in order to grow up and take responsibility for our own actions, it’s the first threshold we need to cross. We meet our Shadow in dreams, as same-sex-as-the-dreamer characters doing stuff the dreamer would consciously never do.  The otherness of the Shadow is the first clue this archetypal energy is at work.  The challenge is to see our Shadow and incorporate it’s existence into our conscious, waking life.  Since we are by definition, unconscious of the Shadow, the only way to understand those aspects of ourselves we need to face and integrate positively, is by paying attentions to dreams, and in my opinion, to FJSS.

In FJSS, the Trickster archetype is also at play alongside the Shadow. The Trickster archetype comes by its name honestly. It’s the energy in life that seems to trip you up or put you off your intended course. Trickster energy in many cultures is closely aligned with the Shadow; it’s manifestations are usually ironically funny.  Examples are the Norse God Loki, wonderfully featured in the movie, "Mask", in which Jim Carrey portrays a human who encounters the Trickster God when he finds a mask of Loki.  In other traditions, like the Afro-Cuban Lucumi, the Trickster god is Eleggua, who is also the gatekeeper and guardian of the crossroads and of all beginnings, so he is propitiated before commencing any human undertaking. 

For Jung, the Shadow is the gatekeeper of the Psyche, which is Consciousness in each of us. With the Trickster, how you respond makes the difference between learning the wisdom offered you by the unconscious or losing the gift in ego fueled befuddlement. 

So in my coed FJSS, what’s behind this slip is a towering Feminine Shadow Archetype; the Prostitute, the “easy woman.”  Interestingly, I just met a new embodiment of her for the first time, Pompa Gyra, the Lady in Red; a Brazilian friend introduced her to me. Recognizing this archetype’s pent up energy and giving her some elbowroom in my personality can help me avoid a lot of silliness and personal repression. In patriarchal cultures, the Feminine Sexual Archetype, personified throughout millennia in many mythic goddess forms, is driven underground.  Woman is split into Virgin/Whore and to various degrees, in various cultures, controlled by that myth.  But the energy of an archetype only doubles when it’s repressed; it needs it’s proper place in the psyche, culturally or personally.

Lucky for me, I live in a country and at a time when that wounded Feminine Archetype is less hidden and beginning to heal. There’s still a lot of cultural skewing of the Feminine, but personally, more women are looking within for who and how they want to be.  I have a wonderful Pompa Gira Shadow from my dream adventures that I’ve written about earlier; her name is Jeze-bella. 

As I make friends with the Jeze-bella in me, I learn to be more critical of the social mores and standards I allow to be knee-jerk truths for how I live my life. With Jeze-bella’s help, I sift through the good girl/bad girl indoctrination and come up with ideas that fit and attitudes that feel right.

So, let’s hear it for the Shadow, the dark side of our personality moon.  Let’s find a way to befriend our own darkness so we transcend the pettiness of projection.  The Shadow is a formidable Archetype until it is integrated; then it is the wisest of teachers.  My dreams have taught me that there is so much to learn that can’t come from books and universities, scholars or authorities.  Many spiritual teachers will tell you that you are born knowing all that you need to know; however, the process of remembering what you need to know after family and culture gets through with you can be a huge challenge. 

Every time you put your ear to the pillow, listen.  If what you hear constantly scares you, get help; otherwise, listen, record, and come to know your dreaming experience and the dream self that lives it every night.  We are on the cusp of a major paradigm shift; the next generations will value their dreaming, both in sleep and waking. Each of us who takes to this path today adds weight to this tipping point we’re living.  

From Robert Moss's wonderful new collection of poetry: "Here, Everything is Dreaming."

Go out in the garden any night,

step one inch outside the tame land

and you are near what you seek.

Open the window of your soul

any night and your guide may come in.

The issue is whether you'll run away

when you see what it is.  To make sure 

you succeed, tether yourself like a goat

at the edge of the tiger wood that breathes

right beside your bed.  He'll come.

 Hunting Power, August 16, 2009

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.

A Dream of Peace for Our Children

Did I hear the man from that gun organization correctly?  The only thing that beats a bad man with a gun is a good man with (I presume a bigger) gun?  Well, I guess, if you're making trillions by selling weapons and representing the armament cartels around the world, that would be a good solution for you.  Everyone knows that the only reason to fight gun violence with more guns is to make money for gun manufacturers.  If you want to hunt, you don't need assault weapons.  But, If your government scares you so much that you need automatic weapons to defend yourself from it, maybe you need another country to live in.   

In March of 1990, Jim was watching the news one evening, when I walked through the room and caught a report about the little Brooklyn boy, David Opont, who was set on fire by kids in his neighborhood for refusing to try crack.  I flipped out.  We lived and worked in Bridgeport, CT at the time with many urban kids and we needed to do something to make life better for them.  Certainly, I felt, this great country can offer its children safety and protection.  So, Jim and I sought funding and over four years produced  "Child’s Play: A Violence Prevention Media Resource" for schools and the community, including  an hour TV documentary, “We The Children: Violence in the Lives of Inner City Children.”

In December of 2012, still living in CT, we experience the tragedy of Sandy Hook. I’m sad, shocked and outraged, but not surprised.  For "Child's Play" we interviewed two of America’s leading authorities on violence, it's impact on children and violence prevention as a public health issue: Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Dr. James Garbarino. They both said the same thing; people across America aren’t feeling this problem because it’s happening mostly in urban communities, but the problem of angry young men, violence and too many guns will hit the suburbs.

In a recent MS Magazine blog post on the Sandy Hook massacre, Soraya Chemaly, points out that the problem of angry young men wielding guns and murdering people is quite common in our country.  "Domestic" violence doesn't get the attention a mass killing does, but it is a problem of epidemic public health proportions. After all, she points out, the first to die that day in Sandy Hook was the 20 year old assailant's mother. (Ms. Blog,"Why won't we talk about violence and masculinity in America?")

This gun ad is reprinted from the MS article, it's for one of the guns that made the Sandy Hook massacre possible.   "Consider your man card reissued?" Really? How does this play in the psyche of a disturbed, conflicted, enraged 20 year old male raised on the glamor of guns and the adrenalin of violence?  

Perhaps we have reached the tipping point, there is a lot we can do to make sure Sandy Hook is never repeated again.  As then Chief of Bridgeport, CT Police, Tom Sweeney, states in "We The Children; " America's going to have to choose between keeping children safe and its love of guns. Stop wringing your hands, there are no new arguments, they've been the same for the past 25 years, (and he's talking almost 20 years ago); make a decision."




Motivated by love and the desire to protect our children, we can make effective changes that don't force them to carry the burden of our problems.  I shudder when I think of all the sweet boys diagnosed with Aspergers, Autism or even ADHD who might become the scapegoats and focus of this crisis because the powerful gun lobby can spin the PR and buy a public approach that takes the "heat" off them; even if it is, as usual, blame the victim. 

The idea that we should fight gun proliferation in our communities with more legally sanctioned gun proliferation is ludicrous.  What does it do to your educational experience to have armed guards roaming the corridors? Ask inner-city children or just consider how you feel about flying these days.  Gun control legislation, especially laws controlling public access to military style assault weapons, ammo and mandating careful background checks for licensing is desperately needed; yet, there is no one factor and no one solution to our epidemic of violence.

Together, using many approaches and our combined effort we can create the culture we want for our children.  In my dream of how we respond to this crisis, we each pick something we are passionate about, something that will do the community good, and do it. Here's how the most eloquent among those we interviewed put it:

We can demand accountability of our legislators and tell them to grow a pair and champion our children's interest over the gun lobby or we'll choose someone who will.   As our experts pointed out, the entertainment industry, with its penchant for gratuitous violence aimed at boys and young men, can be held accountable by the American public.  Let's use our imagination to figure out how we can enjoy beauty and goodness as much as we do blood and gore.  Let's figure out how to make sex sweet, safe, and real and how to reclaim it from the predatory sex industry.  Let's animate and film entertainment for our children that's fun, but doesn't involve all the violence for laughs, shock and awe.  

We can organize community resources so we have things to do together - places to dance, sing, drum together, whether we're single, a couple or a family.  I know a lot of people will point to their church and say, we've got all that right here in our faith community.  With all due respect, if Westboro Baptist Church or Mike Huckabee is what comes with church suppers and socializing around bible studies, I think we need alternatives.  Let's create community centers that aren't focused on creed, but on bringing diverse groups together for the good of all.

One big move at home would be to turn off TVs, computers and other wired devices long enough to be present with the people we love.  Be inventive, find other things to do together - games, word puzzles, story telling contests, nature adventures and walks.

I'd like to suggest that, especially in the evenings, instead of watching TV, a family can play with dreams the way we do in Active Dreaming: creating theater from dreams, writing stories and reading them to each other from dream themes or making up a story from just the title and first line of a dream, each person taking turns adding a line. Pull out the art supplies and draw or paint from dreams, share the pics and talk about them, hang them on the refrigerator. With stories and pictures, we can practice resolving dream conflicts or fears in creative ways.  Always, we respect the dreamer as the only owner and authority of his or her dream, no matter her or his age. 

It is possible to dismantle this culture of violence, if we want to. We can dream a culture we want to bequeath our children for many generations to come and we can set about creating it right now.

A Prayer for Sandy Hook

I'm sharing this moving tribute to the children and adults who crossed over in the tragedy of Sandy Hook, CT last week because I found it very healing.  It's written and performed by Eileen O'Hare, a teacher, who posted it on youtube.  Thank you, Eileen.

God and Huckabee

I share Mr. Einstein's dream for the future, but even so, Mike Huckabee's cannot possibly truly be the voice of American Christianity today, can it?  So God was absent from Sandy Hook and this is what we get?

It's time to hear from the real Christian America, the majority of Christian people who know what Jesus would do, how he would feel and act.  Jesus, the model for Christian practice, is compassionate and loving.  Huckabee sounds  like the lot Jesus called, Pharisees.  At any rate, I at least know this, Jesus would want to help in any way he could; he'd bring comfort, not callous words.

Please, anyone who wants to preserve American Christianity for Jesus, please fire the lot of hypocritical, loud ignoramuses that have risen through the media as the voice of Christian or Moral Majority.  Let's hear from the real Christians, the ones who love and the ones who care, just like Jesus.

I'm not in any formal sense a Christian; I don't belong to a Christian or any other church. I'm not big on religion.  I am very keen on spiritual practice and matters of the soul.  In a Huffington Post piece, a commentator  contrasts Huckabee's awful comments and the wonderful multi-religious speeches at the service at Sandy Hook.  Then she goes on to say that even if you don't have a religion, if you're an atheist...

See, that's where I'd like to widen the scope a bit.  Regardless of your religion or your spiritual practice, your belief or your non-belief, your heart cannot let you say such heartless things to those in grief.    Your heart should want to help.

So let's hope this is a tipping point for those who love their Christian faith and their country, for those who follow Jesus; fire those sorry-ass distorters of Jesus' Word and bring back a religion based on the Love Jesus taught.

Calling all Dreamers

We are reeling from the news of the brutal massacre in Newtown, CT., home to so many friends.  Everyone here, around the country and the world is stunned.  

Early this week, I began reading Dr. Raymond Moody's book, "Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones"  and did one of those nose dive's into a good book. Thursday morning, I walked to the computer still reading Moody’s description of the practice and history of mirror gazing, the ancient scrying art used to contact the departed.   At the computer, I opened Facebook; first post on my feed, Robert Moss: The Science of Mirrors.

http://mossdreams.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-science-of-mirrors.html

After commenting to Robert about the syncro, I turned back to Moody's book.  Later, Thursday, I got to the part where he describes setting up his "modern day psychomanteum" - a temenos/sacred space for communication with our beloved departed, as practiced in ancient Greece.  As he tells the story of finding and equipping his sanctuary laboratory, I remember the wonderful post my friend Trish MacGregor posted on her blog last month about this very passage in Moody's life.  I love the story she tells, which he doesn't include in the book.  The two accounts are a wonderful compliment to each other. http://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=12817

So Friday, Friday the unimaginable happens in a neighboring town and we're again shocked by senseless, cruel, twisted violence, made more shocking because this time, it happens in our home state.  It's excruciating not just for its cold brutality and loss of innocent life, but for it's place in a stream of such events that have occurred over the last few years in our country.

I liken the impact of a tragedy such as this to the concentric circles on the surface of water when a stone falls in.  I stand in an outer circle because I don't have close ties to anyone who suffered this horror today, except the ties of community and caring. From this circle, as a resident of this state and country,  I join my voice to a growing community outcry:  Mr. President and all elected officials, control easy access to guns, especially automatic weapons.  We see over and over again, how one desperate, deluded individual can reek havoc.  Help public welfare trump corporate interests in arms dealing for profit.  Times of crisis are opportunities to do things differently, to transform our grief and rage to healing.  It doesn’t work to put profits ahead of humanity. Private citizens need automatic weapons?  Really?  

I heard the news of this massacre while sitting at our art gallery in Woodbury, CT.  A gentleman customer got off the phone after getting the news from his wife.  He said; “This must be terrorism”.   But, apparently, as in the past, it’s not the enemy without but the one within that attacks, often wearing the face of a lost boy acting out a private rage.  What can we do to stem the tide of violence that sweeps up some of our youth?  

Experts like, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Dr. James Garbarino, both authors of fabulous books on the subject,  have been telling us how to help for years.  I hope we'll all turn our minds and hearts to finding creative, daring, bold and working solutions to the violence, greed, small mindedness, lack of love and lack of soul that's plaguing us.  I dream a future where we all contribute creatively to our children's education and well being. We put their needs ahead of institutionalized rules, and design education around experience and incentive, not testing and categorizing.  

For those of us right now in this outer ring of the catastrophe, who are not understandably consumed with grief, we might ask ourselves; What can we do?  What can we do to alleviate the suffering of those who have remained and of those who have crossed over?   What can we do to ensure that this never happens again?