The Unconscious and Dreaming

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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

Religious Terrorism: It's Time for Change

Religious terrorism is the worst aspect of the six millennia reign of patriarchy we’ve endured on this good earth.  A ferociously violent and anally righteous invisible patriarch sits atop an invisible throne in an invisible kingdom and dictates all that should happen here on earth.  His self appointed representatives command his docile minions and are justified in anything they do in His Name.  Religions are constantly fighting for more control of secular government; that was one of the prime motivators of Church and State separation for our “founding fathers.”  Theocracies are repressive and dangerous; recall the Christian Inquisition of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.

As last week's tragedy in Paris underscores, we live in a world where this energy has intensified, grown more dangerous and more prevalent than it has been for a while.  But there’s no difference between the atrocities committed in the name of one religion that claims absolute truth and power and another.  The worlds big three patriarchal religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity are like a three-headed dog tearing global civilization to pieces.  There are also, as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, secular religions like the Communist State; just as bloody, just as macho just as destructive of the spirit.

I'm tired of it.  Men running around screaming at each other about their gods and their demons and then resorting to the bloodiest means possible to prove their way is right, to carry out their Big Bad God’s will.  I say “men” because, despite the existence of women in the flock of each religion, they're to more or less degrees barred from decision-making power. The more radical and the more extremist the positions in any of the big three father run religions, the worst the position a woman is in if she’s born into the culture.  She’ll have fewer independent rights, many social and legal constrictions and increased danger of victimization, physical or psychological.  I don’t think I have to belabor the point that having to live a life determined for me by fathers, brothers and husbands would greatly suck.  There are wonderful men in these misogynist systems, of course;  in my life, I’ve been blessed in all three categories.  This, however, compares to the fact that there are wonderful white people in a racist society; the paradigm is still skewed in favor of being white, or in patriarchy, of being male.

In my estimation, spiritual transformation that leads to freedom from religious tyranny is a key avenue for bringing about the changes the world needs.  As outside, so within; if we’re captive to toxic psychic belief systems that fill us with self-loathing, anger and hate, then we can’t change how that psychic reality imprints the world around us.  Beliefs like: we’re born unworthy and full of “original” sin, we are perpetual sinners, god was so mad only the death of his one-of-a-kind son could make him relent his peeve, god hates women and gay people, god will get you if you don’t do what his appointed perps, er, priests and prophets, tell you to do, god hates pleasure…etc.,etc, etc.

While some haven’t noticed, there have been rich sea changes in the psychic paradigms of our time. They remain somewhat marginal, but the strength of revelations presented in the words of so many wonderful contemporary spiritual teachers today is fueling the energy of transformation to what I hope will be the tipping point in my lifetime.

For one, Feminism, often seen as a political movement, was critical to cracking the stained glass ceiling of patriarchal religions.  Thanks to Mary Daly's "Beyond God the Father", the return of feminine divinity, the return to earth centered, mother respecting spiritual practices that our ancestors created in the beginning, will go some way to defusing the time bomb that arrogant male theocracies are perpetuating for our planet with their self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies. Not long ago, while accepting a European award that was also bestowed simultaneously on two women, the Dali Lama quipped that Western women will save the world.  Why?  Because besides the usual gifts women have to offer, we have the freedom to develop and exercise our influence in our cultures, and hopefully, beyond them.  Despite ignorance and entrenched machismo in our religions, we have the freedom to exert a greater influence on changing those paradigms. I agree with the DL;  women, men and children who focus on our worlds' problems with their hearts; who know themselves to be spiritual beings having a temporary physical experience and thus keep in touch with their eternal spiritual lives by interacting with their dreaming, can heal this planet.

More challenges to our narrow and literal patriarchal paradigms about who we are and the nature of reality are coming from many of the “sciences” like Quantum Physics, Integrative Medicine and Psychiatry.  And, of course, there’s spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle putting our egoic insanity into straightforward, non-dogmatic perspective.  So the good news is that we’re living a transformation at this moment.  At the same time that we’re experiencing the urgent need created by outer collective insanities, we’re awakening to our individual organic spiritual existence in ways that exclude the need for religious structures that bind us to self-defeating paradigms.  Each person that throws off the yokes of religious psychic domination without tossing the baby out with the bath water, that is, without thinking dualistically, either you accept a religious paradigm or declare yourself a non-believer in “god”, is helping to envision the brave new world we can dream into being, if we want it.

We don’t need to follow a religion; we are immortal.  It’s built in, like a heart, brain and lungs; we have a soul, spirit, self, psyche. There are moments in life, ecstatic or extreme, when the borders between the physical and the non-physical are naturally transparent and we have a direct experience of the divine.  Each time we fall asleep and dream, or meditate or trance, we have access to personal experience of what lies beyond this physical lifetime. We can answer our most important questions for ourselves; we don’t need to let ourselves be manipulated into believing we have to join a religious cult to ensure our safe passage.  On the contrary, it would be unwise to adopt any attitude that has us vibrating in fear, hate, righteous judgment or reactionary violence because in the thought responsive realities of the astral planes, we might perpetuate that environment for ourselves.

In my view, it’s paramount that more and more people make a viable organic spiritual connection for themselves and throw off the religious yokes on our psyche.  I dream that freedom of religion will transform to freedom from religion, so religious terrorism no longer exists.  

As John Lennon says:  

Imagine there are no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

                                 And the world will be as one

If we can imagine it and dream it consistently, we can make it so.  You may say I'm a dreamer; may I say you're one, too?

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.” 

A Waking Dream Or How I Spent Labor Day Weekend

I hope everyone who reads this post can recall at least one magical waking dream from this weekend.  I’m sharing one of mine I really enjoy.

It began with a wonderful tribute to a sister healer at her birthday party on Saturday.  It was beautiful in every way and by the sea, in my neighborhood. I enjoyed sharing the love that poured out to her for hours in our circle and meeting her amazing friends, some of which I friend as well.

When the party was breaking up, a friend says she’s headed down to the small fire pit that had been lit on the beach to burn her journals.  Intrigued, I follow.  Soon she realizes that fire pit won’t do and went to the neighbor’s fire pit.  A circle of friends invited she and I to join them and burn the journals, if she liked.

After much fun discussion among all six or seven, my neighbor in the circle and I began a conversation about dreams. She talked about a recurring dream, about a place that I felt might be a portal for frequent dream reentry. Exciting stuff which we discussed for quite a long time.  One by one I had the most wonderful conversations about dreaming with each member of that group. 

Two days later, on the beach, I spoke to one of the members of that group; when a neighbor introduced me he said; “You’re the Dreamweaver”.

I’ll take that, I smiled to myself; "Yes" I said.  A magical night and the essence of it so encapsulated in a casual remark.  The title of my waking dream is thus; “You’re the DreamWeaver.”

May your best dreams come true.