Tickling the cosmic body

 

When you become conscious that everything is connected in the weave of life – as above so below, as within, so without – you may discover that if you pluck a thread anywhere, you stir the whole pattern. For Synesius of Cyrene, the Neoplatonist philosopher I call the Bishop of Dreams, prophecy requires us to see that we are parts of a cosmic body in which all things are related and can influence each other. At the risk of levity, I am tempted to call the practice derived from this tickling the cosmic body.

“Prophecy is among the best of human pursuits…it gives signs of all things through the medium of all things, because all things which are within that living being that is the cosmos are akin…These signs are different kinds of writings in the book of existence. One wise man learns one sort of writing and another another…All things have significance for all. If birds had wisdom, they would have constructed an art for knowing the future based on observing humans, as we do by observing them. “It was necessary, I believe, that the limbs of this universe which feels and breathes as one belong to one another as parts of a single whole…A person who knows the kinship of the parts of the cosmos is wise, for they can attract one thing by means of another.” [1]

In his important treatise De insomniis ("On Dreams") composed around 405 and dedicated to his teacher Hypatia, "The Philosopher", Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of twitches in the cosmic body as well as a “night book” for dreams.   He declares that “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”. [2] He observes elsewhere that “The same things very often happen in different places and times”.[3]

References

1. Synesius "On Prophecy" trans. Augustine Fitzgerald in Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). Lightly edited by me.

2. Synesius "On Dreans" in Essays and Hymns 3. Quoted in Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley:  University of California Press,1993) p.289.

Illustration: Integra naturae speculum artisque imago ("A complete mirror of nature and an image of art"). The Anima Mundi depicted by Robert Fludd (1617). Here the world soul is feminine and there is a key to correspondences between all parts of the cosmos. Public domain.

Active Imagination and Dream Reentry

 

By my observation, any image that belongs to us can be worked in the cause of healing and resolution and soul growing. I have seen wonders accomplished when a dreamer has resolved to confront an initially dark and terrible image and find the gift in the nightmare. The fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures, and to earn the support of greater powers we are required to brave up. I have also seen lives saved and visits to the ER avoided by getting back inside a dream, clarifying what is going on - and applying that information to avoid manifesting an unwanted future event that may be playing in the dream. This may require courage, and significant work.
     Jung said towards the end of his life that he did not want to spend time with patients who were unwilling to do the work of active imagination. His method of active imagination and my technique of dream reentry have much in common, including the recognition that “dreams are the facts from which we must proceed” and that the raw power of images coming directly and spontaneously to the perceiver must not be shackled to theory or rules of interpretation. Stay with the image, amplify it by tracking its parallels in mythology and folklore and other dreams, go back to the image and develop it through active imagination – these are three signature features of Jung’s approach to dreams, and I encourage active dreamers to practice all of them.  Amplification requires, as Jung insisted, a “wide culture”. Active Imagination, like dream reentry, may demand courage. I think of Robert A. Johnson, the author of Inner Work, a very readable introduction to Jung’s approach. He was terrified by a lion that appeared to him in his study. He knew the lion was a vision, but it was so real he could not bear to enter his normal place of work. After many efforts to reach an understanding with the lion through active imagination, he managed a deal in which the lion would appear as a statue like the ones in front of the New York Public Library, a statue holding a book.
     Our Active Dreaming approach goes to places that Active Imagination may fail to reach. By making a dream or another personal image the portal for a shamanic journey, often powered by drumming, we enter directly into the other worlds and other times where the dream action took place (and may have continuing to unfold after our attention moved elsewhere and we returned to our bodies wherever we parked them.).
     Active dreamers are more likely than most Jungians to seek clues to the future in dreams, to look at the possibility that a dream shows a future event literally or symbolically. He knew that we intuit the future – his own visions shortly before the Great War of a bloody floodtide drowning Europe left him no doubt about that -but he seems to have rarely asked whether a dream could play out in the future in everyday life despite his interest in “primitive” cultures and his familiarity with mountain peasants, for all of whom clues to the future, from a weather forecast to a death in the family,  were one of the main things to look for in dreams.
     Jung was a doctor who guided his patients through amplification and active imagination. I am a teacher who gives dreamers a process they can do by themselves or – if sociable – do with others, using a dream as a portal for an adventure in solo or mutual lucid dreaming.

Illustration: "Drumming for Dream Reentry" by Robert Moss

Dreams are a stage for history: wisdom from a medieval Muslim historian

One of the history books that draws me back every few years is Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah - or "Introduction" - to world history. Writing in the 14th century, in the midst of constant war and turmoil between the rival Muslim dynasties of the Maghreb, he brought modern principles of evidence to the grand ambition of writing a universal history. Many scholars of historiography see him as the first true world historian.
     He was an evolutionist, in his way. He observed that every order of creation may evolve into one above it. For humanity, this would mean evolving to the condition of the angels – “angelity”. For now, only the prophets are at home in that realm.
     Ibn Khaldun wanted to understand the reasons for the rise and fall of different cultures, and identified cycles - or "returns" - throughout history.
      I see I am engaged in one of the "returns" of my own life. In 1967-1968, I considered writing my MA dissertation on the Muqaddimah, partly influenced by a Pakistani scholar of Ibn Khaldun who was at the School of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. He thought I would find the Maghreb historian's approach refreshing. I even embarked on studying Arabic in this cause - but my wife of that era complained that I kept sounding like I was gargling or throwing up, so I switched my thesis topic to West African history.
    Though Ibn Khaldun’s project was often delayed or interrupted by needs of state (he was a minister and ambassador and occasionally a general for the dynasties of Tunis, Fez, and Andalusia) his Introduction is extraordinary, and an extraordinarily good read today. He begins with six essays defining the stage on which history is played out, covering (for example) the influence of climate and geographical features in human affairs, the human need for community, and the nature of group consciousness.
     His sixth essay is the most arresting and arousing. He explains how knowledge of the future, the realm of angels, and the Divine purpose become available through dreams and visions. He distinguishes the "true dream" (which requires no interpretation) from lesser dreams. Ibn Khaldun describes how in dreams the soul travels outside the body, remaining connected by a "thin vapor" whose seat is in the heart. He is very interesting on the theme of how dream experiences are reshaped into more conventional or familiar - and sometimes deceptive - imagery (in ordinary or "confused" dreams) as the dreamer returns.
     He defines the nature of the prophet, making it clear there have been many, though Muhammad is unique because he received and retained the vast and unique revelation that is the Koran. Ibn Khaldun reports that prophets, in the grip of revelation, can appear to lose control of their senses and feel overwhelmed - sometimes "choked", as Muhammad complained to Gabriel - by what is upon them. But unlike mediums or victims of possession, they retain their knowledge and bring it back with clarity, and that knowledge serves and sustains humanity and furthers its evolution.
     All this in laying the foundation for writing history! Today's historians should take note. I was partly inspired by this approach to write my own  Secret History of Dreaming,which reveals how dreams and visions have been a secret engine of history and evolution throughout the whole human odyssey on the planet.

Photo: Doors in Sarajevo by Robert Moss

Play First, Work Later (& delight your inner child)

 

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.
     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise. 
     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.
     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play. 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 

Symbol Magnets and Jung’s Fish Tales

 

 The magnetic power of a symbol, in our lives, can bring together inner and outer events in ways that shift our perception of reality. We learn best about these things through direct experience, and through stories - like Jung's fish tales - that we can trust.     

    When Jung was immersed in his study of the symbolism of the fish in Christianity, alchemy and world mythology, the theme started leaping at him in everyday life. On April 1, 1949, he made some notes about an ancient inscription describing a man whose bottom half was a fish. At lunch that day, he was served fish. In the conversation, there was talk of the custom of making an "April fish" - a European term for "April fool" - of someone. 
    In the afternoon, a former patient of Jung's, whom he had not seen for months, arrived at his house and displayed him some "impressive" pictures of fish. That evening, Jung was shown embroidery that featured fishy sea monsters. The next day, another former patient he had not seen in a decade recounted a dream in which a large fish swam towards her.

    Several months later, mulling over this sequence as an example of the phenomenon he dubbed synchronicity, Jung walked by the lake near his house, returning to the same spot several times. The last time he repeated this loop, he found a fish a foot long lying on top of the sea-wall. Jung had seen no one else on the lake shore that morning. While the fish might have been dropped by a bird, its appearance seemed to him quite magical, part of a "run of chance" in which more than "chance" seemed to be at play. [1]

    If we're keeping count (as Jung did) this sequence includes six discrete instances of meaningful coincidence, five of them bobbing up, like koi in a pond, within 24 hours, and all reflecting Jung's preoccupation with the symbolism of the fish. Such unlikely riffs of coincidence prompted Jung to ask whether it is possible that the physical world mirrors psychic processes "as continuously as the psyche perceives the physical world."
    In her discussion of how inner and outer events can mirror each other, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz suggested that "if the psychic mirrorings of the material world - in short, the natural sciences - really constitute valid statements about matter, then the reverse mirror-relation would also have to be valid. This would mean that material events in the external world would have to be regarded as statements about conditions in the objective psyche." [2]

    Some of the greatest minds of the past century - Jung and Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm - sought to model a universe in which mind and matter, subject and object, inner and outer, are everywhere interweaving. Events, both physical and psychic, unfold from a unified field, the unus mundus of the alchemists, that may be synonymous with Bohm's "implicate order", Their interaction escapes our ordinary perception of causation and of time and space. “Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent...they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience.” [3] 

    Living symbols deeply ingrained in the imaginal history of humankind are charged with magnetic force, which can draw clusters of events together. For those familiar with tarot, it feels at such moments as if one of the Greater Trumps is at play in the world. Traditional diviners understand this, as do true priests and priestesses. Thus one of the Odu, or patterns, of Ifa, the oracle of the Yoruba, is held to bring the fierce orisha Ogun into the space, while another is believed to carry spirits of the dead into the realm of the living. When that happens, you don't just study the pattern; you move to accommodate or propitiate the power that is manifesting.

    To grasp the full power of a symbol, we need to go back to the root meaning of the word. "Symbol" is derived from the Greek σύμβολον (sýmbolon) which combines συν- (syn-) meaning "together" and βολή (bolē) a "throw" or a "cast" A symbol is that which is "thrown together" or "cast together". This is very close to the root meaning of "coincidence". In Latin, to coincide is to "fall together". So it's not surprising that when symbols are in play, coincidence multiplies.
   The first literary mention of a symbol is in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which the god Hermes exclaims, on finding a tortoise, "O what a happy symbol for me", before turning the tortoise shell into a lyre. In the ancient world, sýmbolon came to mean a token, that which brings things together. Thus a symbol might be a pair of tokens that could be fitted together to make a single object. Such tokens might be broken halves of potsherd, a ring or a seal. They would vouch for the truthfulness of a messenger, or an enduring loyalty.    

-  Jung noted in his foreword to his most important work on synchronicity that "my researches into the history of symbols. and of the fish symbol in particular, brought the problem [of explaining synchronicity] ever closer to me" [4] His experiences of symbols irrupting into the physical world led him to sympathize with Goethe's magical view that "We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike." [5] Such powers are magnified when our minds and our environment are charged with the energy of a living symbol. 

   

REFERENCES

1. C.G.Jung, "On Synchronicity". Lecture to the 1951 Eranos conference. Republished in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche translated by R.F.C.Hull [Collected Works vol. 8}, par. 970. Also Jung, "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" in CW8 pars. 826-827.
2. Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology. translated by William H. Kennedy (LaSalle and London: Open Court, 1990) 190.

3. C.G.Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy translated by R.F.C.Hull [CW14] par. 765.

4. Jung, "Synchronicity" CW8 par. 816.

5. J.P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe quoted in Jung, "Synchronicity" CW8 par. 860.

Illustrations: "Fish Woman on the Bridge". Journal drawing by Robert Moss and detail. 

 

Dorveille: sleeping on horseback and the apple-round space

Dorveille. A wonderful term that is sadly obsolescent in Frace, and has no satisfactory equivalent in English, though Coleson Whitehead uses it - with deliberate misspelling as "dorvay" - in his marvelous crime novel Harlem Shuffle. 
     Dorveille, "sleep-wake", is the liminal space between sleep and awake, well-known to active dreamers of any era as the royal road to lucid dream adventures, the site of creative breakthroughs and sudden illumination, and prime time for encounters with daimons, the departed, minor deities and other visitors. It is a term and a state of awareness that had great respect in the Middle Ages. 
    Michel Stanesco, a leading scholar of medieval literature, explains that in the world of the Middle Ages, where the terrestrial and the celestial coexisted, "there were no brusque and decisive dichotomies between the real and the imaginal, the natural and the supernatural, the possible and the impossible. This is why there were no definitive oppositions between dream and reality, between sleep and waking." [1] So the state of dorveille, in which the protagonist, half sleeping, moves in an ambiguous universe, between the mysterious and the familiar, is seen as normal.
    For the chivalric authors of Romance poetry, dorveille might be attained at clip-clop rhythm, sleeping on a horse. En doormen/sobre chevau – “sleeping on a horse” – was how, famously, Guillaune IX of Aquitaine, produced "a poem about nothing." Dozing on horseback was the frequent condition of the knight in the field. Dropping with fatigue on a long journey, maybe after fighting in a field of war, the knight was often led by his horse, sometimes to realms of wonder, to a magic orchard or a floating chateau, and thought himself in Fairyland or Paradise.
     Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la charrette (the Knight of the Carriage) described Lancelot’s drifty state as his head drooped over his horse's neck at a ford

Lui meismes en oublie
ne set s’il est, ou s’il n’est mie
ne ne li manbre de son non
ne set s’il est armez ou non
ne set ou va, ne set don’t vient

He himself forgets
what he is or is not
he doesn't remember his name
or whether he is armed or not
he doesn't know if he is coming or going

 

If this does not seem like much of an incentive to sleep on horseback, consider the possible delights of dorveille in bed as recounted by the French medieval poet and chronicler Jean Froissart. He wrote in "Le joli buisson de Jonece" of being transported during dorveille into  a marvelous space that was “round as an apple”. His experience began when he went to bed early on a dreary winter evening. He felt himself gently touched by fire. As he drifted towards sleep, thoughts and memories arose and became visions. Then Venus – no less – carried him to that apple-round space. The colors were blue streaked with white but they changed with the winds. He could not tell the size of the space he was in but he was always at the center.

 

 

1. Michel Stanesco, Jeux d'errance du chevalier médiéval: Aspects ludiques de la fonction guerrière dans la littérature du Moyen Age flamboyant. Leiden: Brill, 1988. p.149

 

Poetry comes from flooding

 

Stefania Pandolfo’s beautiful but difficult Impasse of the Angels evokes the landscapes – imaginal more than physical – of rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving.
    “Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a younger poet tells her. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release.
     The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident.
     He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it.
    Upon waking he recounted the dream to his mother: "The river in flood entered my mouth and I swallowed it." She told him that he had become a poet. He who had never recited a verse or cared for poetry, he who had even ridiculed poets in his previous life, began to ‘speak’, to utter poetical ‘words.” [1]
    I am reminded of the counsel Anais Nin gave to a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer: “Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”[2]
    I am reminded of my own big dream of a flood, one of those that dream classifiers might call a watershed dream. I dreamed I was walking a deer I called Bear as I might walk my dog in the park. We came to an open plain with a view to a distant horizon. The earth was reddish and looked bare. I glanced to my right and saw a tremendous wall of water rushing towards where we stood. Instead of fleeing, I prepared myself to catch the wave and ride it. I woke charged with creative energy.
    Of course, I wanted to go back inside the dream, to enter its mysteries and to see what would happen if I managed to ride the great wave. I managed to do this in an operation I call dream reentry, in which we use a dream or personal image that has energy as the portal for a conscious journey, which may be field and focused by shamanic drumming. I did not need drumming to go back inside this dream; it was calling me.
     My animal companion was not mysterious. I have long been closely connected both to the deer and the bear as shamanic allies. I was amused that in the dream I called the deer Baer, but this, for me, simply brought into focus the healing aspects of the connection and was not a [particular focus for the lucid dream journey I was going to make. I wanted to catch the great wave.  
     I lay back in an easy chair, closed my eyes, and willed myself back inside the dream. I found myself in ancient Egypt, in Egyptian garb. I was surveying the Nile at the time of the  inundation, when the great river rose to feed the thirsty earth, bringing the crops. As the waters spilled, I saw papyrus plants in great abundance bursting from the earth, which was now black and loamy. I felt deep in my body that I was being invited to enter a fresh period of abounding creative energy. This proved to be the case. A new book, new poems, new projects poured from me and through me. Life was poetry even when I was writing in prose. Poetry comes from flooding.

 

 References

1. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.265]

2. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin. Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (New York: Mariner Books 1972)