The Dreaming

We all dream, every night without fail billions of us enter The Dreaming and as Jung so rightly noted, summoned or not the god enters. What is surprizing about this universal phenomena is, that a significant number of people remember so few dreams or claim to not dream at all. And yet, every night without fail, we all enter the dreaming and have four to five periods of intense dream activity. This activity can be traced, objectively and is, in sleep labs around the world. So, in short, yes you do dream.

In Australia, the land of the legendary “ Dreaming”,  to admit to dreaming is ironically, to admit to being a little soft, or out of touch with reality. The phrase that is commonly used to bring you back to reality, and is used as a put down is, “ you’re dreammin”.

The notion of Dreamtime or The Dreaming, is in fact, a term coined by non indigenous Australians to denote Aboriginal spirituality. It is pictured as a remote, that is far away in time and space. However many indigenous Australians would beg to differ. Bob Randal a Pitjantjatjara elder told Marc Ian Barasch that this is a misreading, and that The Dreaming is not remote but a dynamic presence in the here and now.

One could ask, how we modern westerners became so estranged from the Dreaming?  I’ve heard it argued that we stood at the crossroads at the end of the middle ages where we could have taken a different path. On the one hand we could have developed a deeply symbolic culture, one rooted in metaphor and meaning; or a more rational and literal culture suited to technology and control. We choose the latter. Thus the west conquered the world with it’s powerful technologies. With them the indigenous peoples of the world were decimated, together with their knowledge and their dreaming cultures.

It is alarming to think of how quickly this happened, Australia being a good case in point. On seeing Sydney for the first time a visiting celebrity remarked, in wonder, that it took only two hundred years to build this city. However what she couldn’t see was the dark side of this glistening city on the harbour. That is the loss of a culture that had abided and thrived here for over 40,000 years. A culture that possessed an intimate knowledge of the land, it’s waterways, animals, plants, and seasons. The land and her dreaming, where the very stars above were a part of the sacred whole. And so it took, a mere 200 years for the land and her Dreaming to become, “you’re dreammin”.

My own exploration of The Dreaming, began nearly forty years ago as an undergraduate. I had, been exposed to Jung and his theories of the unconscious before entering university and so just continued that exploration at university. Eventually, though, I realized that more was expected from me than an intellectual approach to Jung and the challenges he presented. And so I made tentative enquires within the Psychology Dept. as to where I might find a Jungian practitioner. This was met with woops of laughter. Enough said, but this was then the late 70s. I did, however find a Jungian practitioner some   eighty miles away in the Blue Mountains. And so it was that I made my way to his door and began my journey into the Dreaming in the land of the Dreaming.

The question I am most often asked in public talks is, “why don’t I dream”?  The quick answer is you do, but you just don’t remember them. The next question is,” how do I do that”? The short answer is to wake up. That is to be awake and conscious during your day which then has a vitalizing effect on your awareness during the night. In short, if you sleepwalk during the day you are unlikely to be “awake” enough to be conscious of your dreams. In short, move out of overdrive and engage with what is. Taking life for granted is a habit, and habits lower vitality; everything becomes the “ same old , same old’. Couple this with the massive amount of media we consume and it’s little wonder that few are aware of a personal and individual inner life, which is the doorway to a spiritual life. What is also telling is that so few equate their inner life with their spiritual life. And yet, we live in a culture that longs for spirituality and will do almost anything to escape the straight jacket of the known. As Jung noted people will do anything other than go within and explore their own soul. The fear, no doubt, is that there is nothing within to explore, that is, a fear of emptiness, a vast nothing devoid of spirit. And yet, every night we enter into the full and boundless reality of the Dreaming, an Aladdin's cave of the possible. And then, sadly for many, they simply wash up on morning’s shore empty handed.

So what does it take to take this journey into the Dreaming? Firstly interest and an open curiosity, for if this is not present  this  will be reflected back to you.  Secondly, prepare in the same way as if you were to go travelling in a foreign land, as you will be to begin with. To begin with take something to record your experience, that is have a notepad by your bed to record what you experienced.

So now you are prepared to enter a new world, where you will require and acquire a new language. The dream world speaks to us in a language of symbols and is non literal,( mostly). It is a language of myth, poetry and archetype. It is also a language of word play and puns as well as visual jokes, through which it delivers it’s potent messages. In short it is akin to poetry, what Thomas Moore calls applied poetics.

In time, as we take notice of both our inner and outer lives, that is, reflect on them, we begin to note that inner and outer are of a piece, and mirror one another. We then may enter a world of expanded horizons and greater depth. The magical part is experiencing the opening up to these once, hidden depths, not to mention creativity and foresight, such of which we have never dreamt of, or have but just failed to notice. This, no doubt, will challenge our smallness and in so doing connect us to the lived reality of the authentic self.

And finally, we are not only changed, but challenged to take off the dark glasses of this sorry world and discover a whole new world that has been waiting patiently for us for sometime, and thus become a participant in our own unfolding journey.

Soulscript The Language Of The Unfolding Of Life

Thomas Moore framed the essence of Soul language in his own unique way when he coined the term “ applied poetics” to encapsulate something as subtle as the language of the soul. In short the language of myth and poetry; mytopoetics. For language it is and like any other language it can be learnt. The first hurdle however, is a kind of unlearning that is an unlearning of the language of the mundane world, the language of literalism and rational materialism. 

So to begin with let me define what I mean by the term soul and it’s companion spirit. The word soul, I feel has been deeply misunderstood and has led to much confusion in the realms of religion, psychology, and spiritual enquiry. For example the words Soul and Spirit are often used interchangeably as if they refer to the same thing, and they don’t. Both words are hard to define and tend to slip your grasp even as you speak them. Yet oddly we all seem to know what we are talking about when we use them. For example when someone says,” It was good for my soul”, or “his spirit soared” we all know, intuitively what they mean.

That being said it would be good to remember that we are dealing with metaphor here, and therefore it would be wise not to try to hammer this into the literal. So for the sake of discussion let us look upon Soul as that which takes us down into ourselves, our subjectivity the place where we actually live. Spirit, on the other hand goes in the opposite direction as it aspires to something beyond itself. One is neither better than the other but rather two haves of the same whole. This whole is something larger than the two haves, our inner and outer reality, and is unified by consciousness itself. This is not theoretical but can be a lived experience which we all may enter, yet sadly few of us do. Rather we substitute outer forms via received belief systems to carve out our reality for us.

Hints as to our participation in this unified field of consciousness are experienced by everybody, not just the enlightened saints. These experiences range from the mundane, knowing the phone is going to ring, to the sublime of the full blown mystical experience; that is the experience of the unity of everything that which is often termed, cosmic consciousness.  It maybe a surprise but up to 35% of people surveyed claim to have had such an experience. And I, for one would   doubt that many have NOT, had at least one uncanny experience in a life time, even if it were as mundane as knowing the phone is going to ring. 

The great American poet Robert Frost said that mind itself is the maker of metaphor and it is the poetics of mind that make us human. Frost saw mind as always working, “ to wrest order from chaos”. Indeed he saw the failure to do just that in the tragedy of his own family as mental illness took it’s toll in suicide and madness.

May we ask then, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are we the stuff dreams are made of or is stuff made of dreams? This stuff, though,  that is the substance of matter has been examined deeply by science. And the deeper we delve the less it looks like matter but more like process. So as we observe the subtle movements between our inner and outer reality we become aware of the vastness we participate in. Further, this becomes personal when we hear the call to wake up. This can be subtle, so subtle that we barely notice it or dramatic almost, as if we are being slapped into wakefulness.

A person of my acquaintance told me this story recently. He had, he told me, been estranged from his son and had wanted a reconciliation even though one seemed far away. At a deep level he knew that it would not happen. He also knew that he should not push it yet against his felt sense of the situation, he went ahead anyway. And so it was on the day he drove to his son’s house he encountered another car heading towards him at full speed on the wrong    side of the road. They passed within centimetres of each other. He still finds it hard to believe that they didn’t collide. The message, “go back you’re going the wrong way”.  Enough said.

A more subtle example is a story relayed by C.S. Lewis in his autobiography “Surprised by Joy”.  This story takes on a profundity as the issue of what is the world made of, myth or matter was being discussed at the time by Lewis and his friends. Lewis an Oxford professor had been in deep conversation with his friends about the nature of existence. And so it was that on a spring morning in 1931 he was walking with these friends Tolkien and Hugh Dyson along the gravel path of Addison’s Walk. Addison’s Walk is a beautiful path within the grounds of Magdalen College Oxford. The walk wends it’s way beneath a canopy of trees flanked one side by the river Cherwell, on the other a deer park. At this time Tolkien had been trying to impress on Lewis that myth was a significant part of reality and was deeply connected to our existence.  Lewis resisted the idea although admitted that mythic tales were often, deeply moving. At a certain juncture in the conversation, a potent moment when the mythic reality was invoked, if you will, they were showered with falling leaves so dense they thought it was raining.  Lewis relays the moment in a letter to a friend Arthur Greeves a few days later,” (we were) interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on a still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down.... we all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such thing almost as we would”.

Lewis later chose his own particular myth, the Christian myth and became an Anglican. His choice of myth was not to the liking of his friend Tolkien who had hoped he would join him in Catholicism.  However on that day on Addison’s Walk the issue was not which myth, but myth itself that confirmed it’s presence. It is not without significance that the two men went on to write mythic tales that have enthralled generations; the Narnia tales and the mythic, Lord of the Rings.

And so we come full circle to the language of the Soul, the language of embodiment of the here and now of existence and yet offering glimpses of eternity. Further this grounding in soul allows us to explore our spiritual lives safely. For it is through soul that we stay in touch with our joint humanity from whence the heart can expand to include all life, and all we share with life.

Life, then can become a spiritual partnership with God, or perhaps the universe or, in the end what will always be “the great mystery”. Yet partnership it is, albeit with the great unknown. Paradoxically, though unknown, it is as intimate as your next breath. Further it is a relationship founded on love and that is LOVE in capitals. This LOVE is written and sung about in all the mystical teachings of both east and west. In the mystical teachings of the west it is referred to as, “The Beloved”. The Beloved has ancient roots, which can be found of its’ most explicit within,”The Song of Songs” in the Hebrew Bible with its’  exquisite love poetry.   “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine”. In Sufism, the mystical path of Islam it is also referred to as The Beloved. In the Christian tradition it is exemplified by St. John of the Cross in his ecstatic evocation of the dark night of the soul in the losing of the Self only to find the Self he says, “ I lost myself in him and laid my face upon my lover’s breast”. This rapture comes from a journey to wholeness through a dialogue with the great mystery of existence. A dialogue that uses the language of myth and metaphor to pry open the heart of the isolated ego. So as once we saw an empty universe now reveals itself as Presence a presence that is present in every molecule of Being.