Again, The Shadow

I recently discovered two authors who write about Jung's shadow archetype.  Paul Levy,  "Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil" and Debbie Ford, "The Secret of the Shadow."  Both have other published work and are well known, though new to me. I haven't read either book yet, but heard them speak on YouTube and am reading some of their work online - fascinating stuff, the shadow.

I keep coming back to the shadow in my posts here, too.  Jung believed that anyone who wants to find balance and wholeness, to individuate, as he put it, must work consciously to shine a light on the shadow.  But it’s a Catch-22 because we seem to have a built-in denial mechanism when it comes to seeing our own shadow.  "Shadow, what shadow? You’re the one with the shadow." 

That would be what Jung called the ego talking. The shadow is every aspect of me which my ego, (that which I accept as myself) rejects, the "not me".  The quicker we are to say not me, the more that denial bears looking into. Here’s a good example from a recent experience I wrote about in my previous post, “Portrait of a Younger Self.” 

I said I would embrace all the wonderful characteristics I rediscovered about my 11-13 yr. old self in an old autograph book I found, but reading what others wrote about me shines a bit of light on my 13 year old shadow, as well.  I noted  how I skimmed over one particular entry when I first read the book. On reading it again, I had to admit to myself that I tried to ignore it because of the way it made me feel.  It was from a boy on whom I had a huge crush; he happened to sit in front of me in one of my classes.  It reads:

"Adelita.  It's been fun sitting in front of you during Cit. Ed., even if you did get my pants dirty."  

Argh!  How embarrassing.  I acted like a SILLY infatuated girl. If there's anything I'm not, it's SILLY.   I did not do dumb groupie stuff at concerts! (Well, I did hoot and holler for my favorite bands.) I love learning and thinking, not being a simpering teeny-bopper.  Ah, you see?  The Shadow.  I should high-five my 13-year old self for her boldness and claim some of that boldness, still.   I want to laugh and embrace my budding sexuality in the aspect of my 13-year old self and let it translate into embracing the mature sexuality of my Crone years.   In Jung’s view, integrating the shadow, accepting rejected parts of the self, leads to a release of creative energy that adds zing to a person’s life.  I think that's true.

I like Debbie Ford's example that resisting the revelation of the shadow, trying to keep from admitting something to ourselves, let alone others, is like trying to continuously hold a large beach ball under water.  That's why, once we join with the beloved cartoon character, Pogo, in admitting, "We have met the enemy and he is us.",  new vitality, hope and possibility becomes available to us.

Since dreaming is a direct path to attaining self-awareness, tracking our dreams and pondering their message in our waking lives can help us meet and integrate our shadow aspects. As Jung saw it,  the shadow can often be found in same sex characters in dreams, although any character can represent a shadow/rejected aspect in ourselves.  A clue to a possible shadow element is a strong, knee-jerk reaction or negative emotional response we may have to that dream element.

Our personal shadow aspects manifest in waking life, sometimes wreaking havoc in our lives, other times projecting havoc onto others.  Projection of shadow fears in the form of “not me, it’s you” is at the root of so much of the evil of our time.  On a personal level, it leads us to create our own messes; on a collective level, it plunges us into wars and other mass disasters.

That’s why acknowledging and somehow coming to a healthy balance with one’s own shadow is part of a dreaming practice.  The good news is that quite often these humbling lessons are delivered in dreams in the funniest ways.  As I was writing this post, I saw this clip of President Obama’s speech at the Annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  It’s typical for the presidential speech to be full of jokes about the relationship between the press and prez, but in this sketch, President Obama illustrates a very good use of the personal shadow. Kudos to him and Keegan-Michael Key

Portrait of A Younger Self

One of my student’s and I have decided to explore visiting our younger selves through dream re-entry.  The intention is to offer assistance to a past aspect of our Self with the hindsight and compassion of a wiser, older sibling.  This lets us revision a former self, perhaps healing a Soul part that might be injured or stuck from that point on in our lives.  Through the practice of dream re-entry, we can find a way to return that Soul vitality to our present time and present selves. 

The imaginal work that Active Dreaming encourages, just as Jung encouraged it under the name of Active Imagination and before all, as indigenous dream practices have done, is my favorite aspect of my dream practice, except for dreaming itself.

Synchronistically, I just found an artifact from my 11-13 year old self among my books; it’s a small white leather autograph book.  They were popular back then, I guess. I found that its pages contained handwritten well wishes from various friends, classmates and teachers, not to mention, from my older by two years brother. 

What a trip!  I read the whole book carefully, several times stopping to marvel at the piece of my past it brings back to me, making it so accessible to me, Now.  With this information, I can more authentically go back and dialogue with my sweet "pre-teen" self and discover more about her.

To honor the waking dream of finding this book and its great assistance to me in my exploration, I called my brother, who lives in the Midwest. I asked him what he remembers about that time in our lives, read him, (okay, teased him about) his entry, shared with him one particularly jaw dropping revelation and reminisced about the teachers and those days.  Funny how, given how much fun it is to talk about our past this way, we don't more often.   This is how  a dream practice activates our waking lives and animates our awareness of life's potentials.

If I empower the little girl I find in the pages of this book, a little book that she carried to school and passed to those whose signature she wanted, will she empower me, too, now?  My answer to that is, yes; definitely.

What do I really want?  Who am I really?  How do I empower myself to do what I desire to do, as best I can and with joy? A dream practice helps us each answer our own heartfelt questions in life, because it helps strip away the many ego illusions we're sold and kindly replaces them with a true mirror into Soul.

In his excellent book, “Dreaming the Soul Back Home” Robert Moss describes how dreams offer us endless opportunities for soul recovery.  In Active Dreaming, Robert uses shamanic soul retrieval practices as the foundation for a new direction in dream play he calls, "soul recovery."  A significant difference between soul retrieval  and soul recovery is that the former requires a trained and skilled shaman, while soul recovery connects each person to  lost soul parts through dreaming and dream practices.  Each person is his or her own shaman.

Although I'm thrilled for the energy my autograph book has generated for me, you don’t need any artifacts from any particular time.  You may find it helpful to pull out pictures or objects, but all you really need is your imagination.  I find re-entering a dream of a 12 year old girl, or of a dream location like the house she lived in, a school or other dream setting familiar to her, any of these is a powerful portal to the past.  If I dreamt it, it has energy for me to reveal and use for my benefit.  

Going back through old dream journals looking for a specific place or type of character is great fun.  I also practice meditating on the well being of that little girl and embracing all her wonderful characteristics as my own. I can release, sadness, shyness, disappointment, whatever, while embracing her good humor and kindness. Meeting her again brings me renewed energy by connection to the passions and freedoms that she carried in my heart at that time.

Living with a dream practice really does beat watching TV all the time

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The Unconscious and Dreaming

http://www.psycheproductions.net/index.html

I’m working with a wonderful student in a Master’s program who wants to do her final project 

on understanding the unconscious. Good luck, right?  I love working with motivated students  because their curiosity sparks and deepens mine.

I first met the unconscious when it hit me upside the head in dreams. As a  college senior, I experienced a whopper of a dream I titled Howling Mary; it was a powerful, precognitive, archetypal, life-mapping dream. I watched it unfold in waking life one unanticipated event after another. After this jaw dropping demonstration of the power of dreams, I embraced dreaming as a spiritual path and never looked back.  

I believe that cultivating a dream life amounts to living two lives (at least) at once, sort of double bang for your buck.  Dreams hold up mirrors to us reflecting what we need to know, nudging us towards what we need to do, prompting us to follow our own understanding and connect with our own vast souls. A dream practice can turn you from a passive persona in your waking life to a full-hearted, courageous creator of your own life in any realm. 

There are many bridges like dreaming into the unconscious, which is good because it’s better to experience the unconscious than to theorize about it. As Robert is fond of quoting from Mark Twain, "I don't want to learn about the moon from someone who hasn't been there."  Twain was a very strong dreamer and often referred to dreams in his writings.

In this new millennia, “psychology” (study of the soul) is transcending rigid objective and mechanistic paradigms. An example is the growing field of NDE, OBE, Lucid and other Dream studies.  For me, Active Dreaming offers expansive tools for inner exploration in a framework that's easy to learn and to teach, but all roads that lead Home are valid.  Each person knows their true north.

  

Develop your own dream practice and your ear is always to the ground of your Being, listening for what comes through. Dreaming is a bridge between waking and spiritual realities.  It's extremely personalized, only the dreamer can say what his or her dreams mean, but it's also universal. Around the world and across time, we all participate in a multiverse through dreaming. One dream can teach us that there is nothing to fear, not in life or in death. We're in a time of huge paradigm shifts and perhaps through our dream gates, help is on the way.  

Consider that dreaming isn't a left brain, simplistic, this or that, analytical brain kind of experience.  Dreams take place on another level of reality; they adhere to different rules, and come in many different varieties.  All dreams aren’t the same; life impacting dreams don't always come in neon. Often it’s those throw away or icky dreams that turn out to be valuable. 

When we say knowledge is power, we may be referring to consensus definitions of knowledge and of power.  But knowledge and power can also mean inner knowledge, Wisdom, and spiritual power, Love.  Mystical knowledge (spirituality) as the ancients taught,  is found in other dimensions, in dreams, visions, nature, meditation, prayer and near death moments.

Religion and spirituality aren’t the same thing; religion demands I follow rules and believe things that can prove detrimental to my soul. Religion often demands I give up my curiosity, my private search, and adhere to somebody else’s good idea about God. Spirituality, however, knows me for a spark of Divinity and asks me to act accordingly.  

One of the most wonderful things about Jesus is that he always challenged the establishment (but still listened to his mama).  What’s not to love about the guy? The kingdom of god is within; he wasn’t kidding.  But the god preserved on clay tablets is not the same as the living god/goddess of each soul. Your god may not be for me.   If you threaten to hang, quarter or behead me for following my own intuition and spiritual connection, I think you have anger issues. Vive y deja vivir.

Dreams are the royal road to my own unconscious and beyond.  Experiences in my waking life and in my dream life count equally and are the sum of my/this life experiences.  Following my dream life on a regular basis, and honoring the dream lives of others, has taught me many things that make hope possible. Isn't that why we have faith in "God?" 

I always make a small disclaimer about developing a dream practice alone because there are times for some when dreams are snarled in private nightmares rooted in traumatic waking experience. Thankfully, there are more and more healers in traditional and non-traditional roles, who can help a traumatized person rebuild that inner bridge. With time and support, may we each find our way back to center. 

The contemporary conversation on the nature of “Consciousness” is exhilirating. Does "that which we know to be ourselves" die with the physical brain or is our true nature non-physical, non-local, a spiritual reality.   And what about the Unconscious then, if Consciousness is non-local is it the same as the Unconscious? Is Consciousness a part of the whole that is the Unconscious?   Is it a matrix where each spark of consciousness glows forever?  These questions are from new frontiers.  It's an exciting time to be an explorer.

 “You are not just the drop in the ocean. You are the mighty ocean in the drop.”  

                                                                                                                                                                                      Rumi

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