Dreams belong to the dreamers

Henry Reed, one of the fathers of the American dreamwork movement, has left this world for the Dreamtime. In his honor, I am reposting this blog that first appeared here on July 7, 2010 after Henry and I recorded a conversation for my Way of the Dreamer radio show. 

I had the pleasure this week of talking to Henry Reed, one of the pioneers of the American dreamwork movement. "Forget psychology," said this PhD in psychology with winning bluntness. "Dreams belong to the dreamers, and dreaming is an experience, not a text or a theory. Dreams are natural experiences, and there are natural ways to honor and unfold them."

I asked Henry to describe how he was drawn to dreaming and dreamwork, and he recalled a time back in the late 1960s when he was a postgrad student in psychology and estranged from his dreams. He was greatly impressed by a friend who not only dreamed a lot, but was able to follow his dreams on interesting paths of manifestation. The friend dreamed he was living in a big, beautiful house in Santa Monica, and the dream led him to a wealthy couple who were willing to rent him that dream house cheap if he worked on fixing it up. When Henry asked him, "How did you learn to dream like that?" he spoke of the work of the psychic Edgar Cayce, who received messages in his sleep and taught the importance of dreams.

Henry made it his intention to start remembering and using his dreams, but it took him several months before he managed to catch even a broken fragment from the night. He was drinking hard at the time, he recalled with candor. Then one morning, after waking, he remembered he had seen a flying goat. He was able to use that surreal image, and his excitement about it, to pull back more of a dream in which he was with a wise old man in a rural location. There was also a drunk in the scene, and the evidence of his drinking and poor diet - an empty wine bottle, a crumpled potato chip bag and mayonnaise - were littered around. Coming out of his impromptu dream reentry, Henry felt a keen desire to be more like the wise old man, and less like the drunk he recognized as a version of himself.

Several decades after that dream, living on a rural property in the mountains of Virginia where he raises goats, Henry saw his dream enacted when a goat - leaping over a gorge - appeared to be flying. He notes that he has come to look somewhat like the wise old man in his dream that he agreed might have been his future self, looking in on his student self, to help pull him through.

Working with Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) Henry conducted many experiments in group dreamwork, starting in the 1970s. He improvised and revived rituals for dream incubation and dream sharing, and a "dream helper ceremony" in which a group of dreamers were encouraged to dream on behalf of one of their number.

More recently, Henry has encouraged a form of "memory divination". I recall experiencing this, under his guidance, in a workshop at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams in Oakland in the late 1990s. Henry invited us to sit with a partner and notice what personal life memory rose into our consciousness in the presence of that other person. Then we would swap dreams and see how our personal memories might illuminate the other's dreams. I use a stripped-down version of this approach in intuition games in which I simply have partners notice what life memory of their own comes to mind in the presence of the other. This tends to confirm that we know more about each other - perhaps through our overlapping energy fields - than we consciously realize.

Henry Reed has collected many of his essays and papers in Dream Medicine, from which I'll give some of my favorite quotes:

"It is difficult to continue to recall dreams if you do nothing with them."

"Dreams...have healing power; but that power is, believe it or not, independent of our ability to understand them."

"Perhaps the most significant development concerning dreams in the latter decades of the twentieth century is returning them to their rightful owner, the dreamer."

The final quote is the best:

"Our culture is opening to public discourse on another dimension of reality until such time as we can consensually inhabit non-material realms of experience."

Henry and I agreed that, for both of us, this is the heart of the matter.

Henry's dream of a flying goat led him to kick the sauce. Ironically, a flying goat is also on the label of an excellent pinot noir.

Ghost Writers: The Rhyming Case of the Thirteen Lost Cantos

Classic mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers maintained that her best work was not any of her novels but her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When she died in 1957 the last thirteen cantos of her translation of the Commedia – the final verses of the Paradiso – remained unfinished. They were completed by her friend Barbara Reynolds in a remarkable feat of ghost-writing described by Reynolds in her 2006 biography, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man.

There is an extraordinary literary echo here, involving another kind of ghost. When Dante died, the same thirteen cantos were missing from his text of the Paradiso. 

Dante succumbed suddenly to malaria in 1321. He had been elated, not long before, to complete the Commedia during a burst of writing in Ravenna, on the Adriatic. Now his survivors could not find the final thirteen cantos.

In his Vita di Dante, Boccaccio relates how Dante’s children and “disciples” searched for the lost cantos for months, only to give up in despair, “enraged” that God would take Dante from the world before sharing the entirety of his work. Two of his children, Jacopo and Piero, decided they would attempt to complete the work themselves. Luckily, a miracle occurred to “check [this] foolish presumption.”

Exactly eight months after his death, Dante appeared in a dream to Jacopo. He showed himself with a shining face, in shining white garments. Jacopo asked him if he was alive. Dante replied, “Yes, but with the true life, not this life of ours [in the world]”. Jacopo asked about the lost cantos. Dante took him to a room where he used to sleep. He touched one of the walls and said, “Here is what you have been looking for.”  

Jacopo woke up and enlisted a friend to help search the house where his father had lived. They inspected the wall Dante had indicated. They searched behind a rug hanging in front of "a little window in the wall" and found the missing cantos “all moldy with the damp of the wall, and close to rotting if they had stayed there much longer.”

Illustration for the Paradiso by Giovanni di Paolo, 1450

Swan Inlet

 

For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of swans. eyes closed and eyes open. Sometimes they lend me their forms. In a European city, in the twilight state before dawn, a swan rose from my third eye and we flew together over the river and the rooftops. 

This report I entered in my journal two years ago just flew out, seeking more attention. I will share it unedited: 

September 9, 2020

Dream

Swan Inlet

I stand in the woods near water's edge. The light over the bay is rosy gold, as are the waves. They move slowly. The water looks heavy and oleaginous. My guide explains that only swans are at home here. Other water birds avoid this inlet and don't swim in it. We watch a swan gliding into the swell, rocking with it, dipping its head and body after fish. 

Everything is suffused with that golden and rosy light. There is healing and magic here and the secret is with the swans.

Waking, I put myself back in the scene. I pick my way through roots and vines to stand at the edge of the bay. I take from it and the water in my cupped palm looks like olive oil in a spoon. It is lightly scented, a pleasing aroma. On my tongue it is warm and salted just right, like virgin dipping oil in an Italian restaurant. A swan is watching me closely. Will it share the secret? Can I rise on its wings as I did before?

I hope that the guide who was instructing me before will answer. But the only voice I hear now is my own. Swans fly over the oily waters in arrowhead formation toward the pink sun on the horizon.

                                                    ~

I think of Plato and the swans. There is a Greek tradition that Socrates dreamed the night before he met Plato that a young swan settled n his lap, developed at once into a full-grown bird and took off into the sky with a song that enchanted all hearers. [1]  In the Phaedo, Socrates says that swans sing most beautifully when they sense they are going to die. “They rejoice because they are about to approach the god whose servants they are.” This, we are told, should be a model for humans. 

Socrates says of himself that “like the swans” he is in the service of Apollo, “the holy property of a god.” Here, among swans, he gives the best definition of real philosophy, that it is “nothing other than practice for dying and being dead.” [2]

Before his death, Plato is said to have dreamed he shapeshifted into a swan.

I think of the swan in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, or "Great Forest Book", one of the oldest Upanishads, at least 2300 years old.. In a beautiful passage, the dreamer travels between worlds as "the lonely swan", flying in and out of the nest of the body. We are told that the dreamer is godlike in their ability to create in the dreamspace.

Here the dream state is described as a state of "emitting" [srj], a word that can also mean the ejaculation of semen. The dreamer "emits" [srjate] or projects "joys, happinesses and delights...ponds, lotus pools and flowing streams, for he is the Maker." We learn that as we grow the practice of dreaming, we can create realities. The word srj is also used to describe the way a turtle projects its head and paws from under its shell.

I think of the swan shamans of the Dane-zaa of the Pacific Northwest, who used to be called the Beaver Indians. Their word for a shaman is Naachin, which means Dreamer. As in the Upanishads, the Dane-zaa say that a powerful dreamer travels like a swan from and back to the nest of the body. ”The Dreamers are like swans in their ability to fly from one season to another. Like the swans that fly south in the winter, Dreamers fly to a land beyond the sky and bring back songs for the people on Earth.” [3]

I think of a shapeshifting Irish god who must become a swan to meet and mate with his dream lover. He is Aengus, and she is Caer Ibormeith, which means Yew Berry and hints at intimacy with death and the underworld. Yew Berry is under an enchantment, sometimes represented as a curse, sometimes - in the deeper tellings - as a gift. She does not stay in one form. She is a beautiful woman for one year. Then for the next year she is a white swan. Then the cycle repeats.  

The day of shapechanging is Samhain. Halloween. If Aengus would win the lady, he must find her on the liminal day, on a lake whose name is The Dragon's Mouth. At Samhain, Aengus goes to the Dragon's Mouth. He finds "three times fifty" white swans with silver chains around their necks, and one swan with a gold chain. He recognizes his love in the shape of the beautiful white bird, and calls to Yew Berry to fly to him. No, she tells him. You must change into my form.

Aengus changes, becoming the long-necked bird. They mate, in beating splendor, above the deeps of the Dragon's Mouth. They fly together back to the palace of Brugh na Boinne - Newgrange - and the love music they make in flight is so lovely and lulling that all the land is at peace and people drift into pleasant dreams and stay there for three days.  [4]

References

1. Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994) 3.

2. Phaedo 64a.

3.  Robin Ridington, “They Dream about Everything: The Last Dreamers of the Dane-zaa” in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds) Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014) vol. 2, 194.

4. Jeffrey Gantz, trans. and ed., "The Dream of Óengus" in Early Irish Myths and Sagas (New York: Dorset Press, 1985) 107-112. I have used Yeats' preferred spelling for the name of the Irish god of love and dreams. For my full account of this story, see Robert Moss, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2005) 18-21. 

Photo by Romy Needham

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

Dream readers and Raven shamans

 

I always scratch my head when I see dream researchers reporting that reading is a rare activity in dreams, or that if you start to read in a dream the text will blur and you won't be able to bring anything away. Perhaps these conclusions are based on the fact that the typical survey group is college kids, who may be less enthusiastic about reading than other sections of the population. Anyway, for as long as I can recall I have read at least as much in dreams as in ordinary reality and this have given me extraordinary leads for my own research, mystery words that prove to be keys to previously unsuspected cultural treasuries, and paragraphs - sometimes pages - of fresh material for my books.

Opening an old journal at random, as I often do., I found an entry from 1996 that put me on the trail of an ancient Hellenic shaman who was reputed to be able to take flight from his own mouth in the form of a raven. Here is my journal entry, edited only for length:

January 28, 1996

Dream Archaeology: Keys from Mantis

I am greatly excited because I have discovered several relief carvings from Mantis, an Egyptian site. Their images were separated in an exhibition or catalog. When brought together, they hold the key to an ancient mystery. Some are fragmentary.
    I go through dictionaries and reference books, working out the connections. I look up meanings for the words Diva (or Deva), Divina and Drostic (“to do with defense of lost causes”). One of the reference books contains verses and a heroic genealogy derived from the Arimaspea.

Waking, I recognize the last reference. The Arimaspea is a lost epic poem attributed to Aristeas of Proconnesus. It describes a people of the north, the Arimaspi, who live in mountains that may be the Carpathians and battled with griffins for access to gold. We know the work through fragments preserved by Herodotus, who says that Aristeas journeyed to fierce northern peoples, “possessed by Apollo”.

 Aristeas was a Greek shaman, living on an island near modern Istanbul, who projected a second body from his mouth in the form of a raven, and was credited with the power of bilocation. I own a book about him by an English classical scholar.

Aristeas was said to have dropped down dead in a fuller’s shop in Proconnesus, on the Sea of Marmara. At the same time, he was seen alive and well at Cyzicus, four hours away by boat, on the mainland. When the news reaches his town, his body – already prepared for burial – is found to have disappeared. 

 In book IV of  the Histories, Herodotus reported of "the birthplace of Aristeas, the poet who sung of these things", 

I will now relate a tale which I heard concerning him both at Proconnesus and at Cyzicus. Aristeas, they said, who belonged to one of the noblest families in the island, had entered one day into a fuller's shop, when he suddenly dropped down dead. Hereupon the fuller shut up his shop, and went to tell Aristeas' kindred what had happened. The report of the death had just spread through the town, when a certain Cyzicenian, lately arrived from Artaca, contradicted the rumor, affirming that he had met Aristeas on his road to Cyzicus, and had spoken with him. This man, therefore, strenuously denied the rumor; the relations, however, proceeded to the fuller's shop with all things necessary for the funeral, intending to carry the body away. But on the shop being opened, no Aristeas was found, either dead or alive. Seven years afterwards he reappeared, they told me, in Proconnesus, and wrote the poem called by the Greeks The Arimaspeia, after which he disappeared a second time. This is the tale current in the two cities above-mentioned. [trans. George Rawlinson]

Two centuries after his death, Aristeas appeared in Metapontum in southern Italy. He commanded that a statue of himself be set up and a new altar dedicated to Apollo, declaring that since his death he had been travelling with Apollo in the form of a sacred raven.

Other details from the dream remain obscure or mysterious. Mantis is a familiar word. In Greek, a mantis is "one who divines, a seer, prophet,"(from mainesthai "be inspired," related to menos "passion, spirit"). But does this correspond to a site in Egypt? Seventeen years after I journaled my report, I have not found confirmation of the meaning of "drostic" (not drastic) that was given in the dream. 

Illustration: "From the Mouth of Aristeas" by Robert Moss

Birth of Apollo

I cannot be born
on solid ground,
only where everything flows.
To enter my dawn
you must be unbound
from how the fixed world goes.

Leave behind

your maps and losses,

let  dreams be all your law.

Trust the wind

when the ocean tosses,

burn your boats on the farther shore.

Make new songs

and your floating island

will be rooted beneath the waves.

Drink my sun

and you dance on the high land

your heart, remembering, craves.

This poem is included in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

Island of Delos by Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann (1847). According to legend, Delos was a floating island until Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were born there.

Wakeful Ecstasies of Swedenborg

 

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was the son of a Lutheran bishop attached to the Swedish court. Living at the dawn of modern science, he mastered all the sciences of his day. He was driven by a passion for knowledge. He became fluent in nine languages. He made his own telescope and produces designs for a submarine and an airplane. He published a whole library of scientific treatises on subjects ranging from algebra to fossils, from hematology to the brain. In the words of one of his biographers, “he exhausted all the known sciences after founding several of them.”

Then he brought his towering intellect and his experiential approach to the study of the unseen. He was called to the new work by his dreams. In his fifties, he began keeping a dream journal in which he was wholly frank about erotic dreams as well as spiritual adventures. In twilight states, between sleep and waking, he found himself being drawn into experience of a deeper reality. Surfacing from sleep, he found himself entering “wakeful ecstasies.” 

I lay awake, but as if in a vision; I could open my eyes and be awake if I wanted to, but yet I was in the spirit — there was an inward and sensible joy through my whole body. 

In the city of Delft, on the night of April 6, 1744, Swedenborg experienced the vision that transformed his life and work. Retiring early, he wrestled with an entity he described as the Tempter. After his struggles, he heard a noise under his bed, which he interpreted as the departure of this dark being.

He started shivering uncontrollably.  He was at last able to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Then: 

I trembled violently from head to foot and there was a great sound as of many storms colliding, which shook me and threw me on my face. In the moment I was thrown down I was fully awake and saw how I was thrown down. 

Terrified by this wholly vivid experience of being propelled outside his physical body, Swedenborg prayed for help. As he held up his folded hands — the hands of his subtle body — “a hand came which clasped mine hard.” He found himself in the presence of a radiant being he took to be Christ. 

I saw him face-to-face….He spoke to me and asked if I had a certificate of health. I answered, “Lord thou knowest that better than I.” He said, “Well, then act.” 

Afterward, Swedenborg found himself traveling far and deep into nonordinary reality in a state that was “neither sleep nor wakefulness.” He conversed and interacted with beings in the spirit would “the same as with my familiars here on earth, and this almost continuously.” He conversed with dead people “of all classes,” including many people he had known during their physical lives. They gave him information he was able to verify and put to use. 

These encounters gave him a firsthand understanding of the conditions of the afterlife. Previously, his religious faith had convinced him that the spirit survives physical death. Now he could begin to study how it survives.

He gained important insights from encounters with departed people he had known before their deaths. He discovered that dead people are frequently confused about their situation because they cannot distinguish between the physical body and the subtle body. During the funeral of Christopher Polhem, one of his former teachers, Polhem “came through” to Swedenborg, “asking why he was buried when he was still alive.” The dead man was puzzled by the fact that, while the priest sermonized about the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment, “he was still alive” and “sensible of being in a body.”

 Swedenborg’s observation of the condition of other spirits in the afterlife led him to formulate the important observation that “when a man dies, his soul does not divest itself of its peculiarities.” He observed the condition of the executed nobleman Eric Brahe and reported that two days after his death “he began to return to his former state of life, which was to love worldly things, and after three days he became just as he was previously in the world.”

The departed follow the path of their desire and understanding. In his soul journeys, Swedenborg tracked them into many regions in the Otherworld. He encountered an angelic guide who told him that the “other members of his society” were appalled by the “crass ignorance” of the real conditions of the afterlife that prevailed among Westerners even after they took up residence in the spirit world.       
Swedenborg’s mentor told him that “angels” of his rank are instructed to gather newly arrived spirits, find out their ideas about heavenly joy — and give them what they desire. “You know that everyone that has desired heaven…is introduced after death into those particular joys which he had imagined.”

For example, there is a heaven for big talkers and another for big eaters. There is a paradise for those who believe the promise that they will rule with Christ forever; they see themselves enthroned as kings and princes. If you think of heaven as a beautiful garden, you get to smell the roses. But in all cases, according to Swedenborg’s mentor, you will be bored to distraction within two days. 

Now that you are ready to move beyond your expectations, the guide assigned to you can begin to instruct you on further possibilities. By one means or another, you will learn that happiness requires “doing something that us useful to ourselves and others.” Swedenborg’s angel explains that heaven is not a fixed environment or program of events, but a state that corresponds to — or is actually created by — the spiritual condition of its inhabitants.

The local clergy were not enthusiastic about Swedenborg’s road maps, or the fact that his example might encourage others to go exploring for themselves. Inflamed by Swedenborg’s observation that few priests (“that order of which very few are saved”) seemed to prosper on the other side, a Swedish minister plotted to have him judged insane and committed to a lunatic asylum.

Swedenborg’s geography of the afterlife was the gift of experience, which invites us to go beyond his maps, just as he went beyond the maps of previous explorers. His basic travel techniques will be recognized by active dreamers. They include: 

Deep relaxation: He would close his eyes, focus his attention on a single theme or target, and slow his breath. He first practiced this approach, especially breath control, in childhood during morning and evening prayers. He spoke of the “passive potency” of his meditation practice. The heart of it was to “withdraw the mind from terms and ideas that are broken, limited, and material.”

Experiment in the twilight zone: The half-dream state on the cusp between sleep and waking was Swedenborg’s favorite launchpad. He described this state as “the sweetest of all, for heaven then operates into [the] rational mind in the utmost tranquility.” He worked with both spontaneous and familiar photisms. For example, he writes of an “affirming flame” that would appear on his inner screen at the start of a journey or in the midst of a writing binge, reassuring him that conditions were favorable and that he was on the right track. 

Soul journeying: Swedenborg developed a fluid ability to shift consciousness and travel beyond the physical plane. “When I am alone my soul as it were out of the body and in the other world; in all respects I am in a visible manner there as I am here.” 

Night and day, he lived and worked as an active dreamer. His banker friend Robsahm observed that Swedenborg “worked without much regard to the distinction of day and night. Swedenborg himself noted, “When I am sleepy, I got to bed.” He kept a fire going at all times, drank large quantities of coffee with a huge amount of sugar. His dress at home was a robe in summer, a reindeer coat in winter.

Across the centuries, his words echo as a clarion call to new generations of explorers who refuse to settle their accounts with possibility and just do it: 

I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections. But by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt.

 

 

Text partly adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and LifeBeyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Illustration from Swedenborg Foundation

Ten Things to Say Before You Die

 

I love you

The only time is Now

May my doors and gates and paths be open

If you can dream it you can do it

Don’t leave home without your sense of humor

I brought something new into the world

I have not obstructed water when it should flow

Walk on the bridge, don't build on it

Je ne regrette rien

Dogs love you no matter what

Picture: "Dogs in Heaven" by Robert Moss

Soul loss and soul recovery: Essential Q&A

Ø  What is soul loss?

When we suffer trauma or bitter disappointment or violent shock, soul may leave the body, to escape. This produces the phenomenon that psychologists call dissociation and shamans call soul loss. It can be seen as a survival mechanism. When you can’t take any more pain, you go away in order to make it through.
          A child who has been abused, a survivor grieving for a beloved partner who has died, a lover who has been betrayed and abandoned, a soldier who  is shell-shocked, and the victim of a terrible accident are all likely to have suffered major soul loss.
          Let’s notice that soul loss need not be major, or the result of violent events. We suffer a lesser degree of soul loss when we choose one direction in life over another, or when we put our energy and focus into one thing rather than another – like holding down the job instead of pursuing a creative project, or being a mom instead of a lover (or vice versa).  Soul loss may be merely temporary and transitional “soul drift”, as when we are jet-lagged and it takes a while for us to catch up with ourselves. 

Ø  What are the symptoms of soul loss?

Common symptoms of soul loss include:  chronic fatigue;  emotional numbness; chronic depression;  spaciness;  addictive behaviors; low self-esteem; inability to let go of past situations or people no longer in your life; dissociation and multiple personality disorder; obesity or unexplained weight gain;  abusive behaviors;  absence of dream recall;  recurring dreams of locations from earlier life, or of a self separate from your present self

Ø  What is the difference, in a practical sense, between someone with a lot of soul in their bodies and someone who does not?

For people with a lot of soul, or vital energy, in their bodies, most of the symptoms of soul-loss listed above would be rare, transient, or absent. For someone who has suffered significant soul loss, three or more of these symptoms are likely to be chronic.

Ø  Why does the soul have a hard time staying in the body?

We suffer pain or abuse, grief or shame, and part of us finds the world so cruel that we want to go away. Soul loss is also caused by wrenching life choices: we decide to leave a relationship, a home, a job, a country, a lifestyle — but part of us resists that choice, sometimes to the point of splitting away and withdrawing its energy from our lives. We also lose soul energy when we give up on our dreams and settle for a life of dull compromise, refusing to trust ourselves to love or to take that creative leap.

Ø  Where does soul go when it leaves?

Sometimes we find that a part of ourselves  is stuck in the old place, in Granma’s house, or in the apartment we shared with our first love. Sometimes a soul part we lost seems to be living in a separate reality, like the land of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. When we wish ourselves dead, a part of our soul may go far way, as far as a Land of the Dead.

Ø  Are all aspects of soul recoverable?

There are parts that are so damaged we don’t want them back. Sometime they appear burned or charred, dark or addicted. Sometimes our life choices are so radical that a part of ourselves simply cannot be persuaded to share our present situation. My inner businessman is quite disgusted with the choices I have made, and won’t stay close to me unless I make money more of a priority than I am likely to do!

Ø  What is the first step that someone who would like to experience more soul in their life to take?

You do some cleanup, and you ask for help. In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, as in my retreats, I offer practical guidance for psychic cleansing and release. One of my favorites is a very simple fire releasing in which we cast out any heavy energies that are holding us back and clear a space for vital soul to come back in. It’s very important to remember that we have help available, including from our spiritual allies and our own Greater Self, and that it’s always a good idea to ask for help nicely.

Ø  What role does addiction play in soul loss?

Addiction can be both a cause and an effect of soul loss. Part of our brighter energy may leave us if we fall into habits and company it doesn’t like. When we are missing a part of ourselves, things come in to fill the gap, and we reach for things to fill that gap. From a shamanic viewpoint, addictions are often worsened by spirits of the dead who are seeking to feed their own cravings through a living person. I have never met a true alcoholic, for example, who has not (from my viewpoint) been accompanied by dead drunks. In the book, as in my programs, I offer practical guidance to create healthy psychic boundaries between the living and the deceased.

Ø  What is the difference between spirit and soul? 

We can’t lose spirit, when the term means mind, higher consciousness or our spark of the Godhead.  But we can lose contact with it, and block our own access to the Greater Self.  Soul is a different matter. Soul is quite mobile and soul energy is divisible; we can lose parts of it and take on parts from others that we really don’t want around.

Ø  You have developed an original approach to healing through what you call “soul recovery”. What are the key elements in this approach?

We use the core techniques of Active Dreaming to bring more of soul into the body and help others to become whole. By learning to share dreams with others in the right way, we create a safe space where our younger and brighter selves can draw closer, and we start to build communities of soul friends. By learning to use a dream as a doorway through which we can travel — in shamanic lucid dreaming — into a deeper space, we can go to the places where lost souls can be found and reclaimed, and we help each other to do this.

Ø  Are there other ways, in addition to working with our dreams, to experience soul recovery?  If so, what are they?

Soul retrieval, as opposed to soul recovery is a shamanic operation in which the practitioner makes a journey on behalf of a client to locate lost aspects of soul, brings them back, and transfers them to the client’s body, often by blowing them into energy centers such as the heart and the crown of the head. It can be a profoundly healing event. It reaches parts that Western psychology often does not reach, and may be essential in cases where people are missing so much of themselves that they are not equipped to become self-healers until an intervention has taken place. The limitation of this is approach is that nearly everything depends on the character and skill of the practitioner, on the reality of his or her connection with spirit helpers, and on the quality and motivation of those helpers.

Ø  You say that dreams not only show us what the soul wants, they also show us where it has gone.  Please elaborate and provide an example of this.

Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may be missing, and when it is timely to bring them home. Recurring dreams in which we go back to a scene from our earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has remained there. Dreams in which we perceive a younger self as a separate individual may be nudging us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at that age. Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful child is – until we take a closer look
     A middle-aged woman recently approached me for help. She told me, "I feel I have lost the part of me that can give trust and know joy." As preparation for our meeting, I asked her to start a dream journal, although she had told me she had not remembered her dreams for many years. When she came to see me, she had succeeded in capturing just one tiny fragment from a dream. She remembered that she was standing over a table, looking at three large-size "post-it" notes. Each had a typed message. But the ink had faded and she could not read the messages.
    Slowly and carefully, I helped her to relax and encouraged her to try to go back inside her dream. Quite quickly, she found herself inside a room in the house where she had lived with her ex-husband prior to their divorce, almost twenty years before. Now she could read the typed messages. The first read in bold capitals, "YOU CAN DO IT." They were all about living with heart, and trusting life.
    She realized that she had left her ability to love and to trust in that room for nearly twenty years. I asked her what she needed to do. She told me, "I need to bring my heart out of that room and put it back in my body." She gathered up the messages and made the motion of bringing them into her heart. As her hands crossed over the place of her heart, we both saw a sweet and gentle light shine out from her heart center. She trembled, eyes shining, and told me, "Something just came back. Something that was missing for twenty years."

Bear creation by Tracy Cunningham. Bear is a great ally in soul recovery.

What’s Going On in Your Dream House?

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday.
    Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self.
     It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors.
     I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony.
     I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days.
    By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams.
    The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife.    Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.
     How about drawing or mapping your dream locales, making floorplans of that dream house? You will be growing your astral geography in ways you will find increasingly rewarding and exciting. You may even find you are claiming some real estate options in this world or the next.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts in Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness : "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” 

Drawing: "Double on the Balcony" by Robert Moss

Soul Loss: The Shaman’s Diagnosis of Our Existential Complaints

 

The greatest contribution of the ancient shamans to our medicine and healing today is the understanding that in the course of any life we are liable to suffer soul loss - the loss of parts of our vital energy and identity - and that in order to be whole and well, we must find the means of soul recovery.

     On a visceral level, we all know how soul loss comes about. We suffer pain or trauma or abuse, we are overwhelmed by grief or guilt or shame, and part of us goes away because it doesn't want to stay in a world that seems so harsh and cruel. We are compelled to make a wrenching life choice, leaving a partner or a job or a home, and part of us resists that choice and parts company with our dominant personality, clinging to the old relationship or the old place. Soul loss deepens when we fall into depression or addiction or make compromises with the world as we understand it, giving up on our big dreams of life. Lacking the courage and confidence to make that creative leap, or to trust ourselves to love, we wimp out - and part of our bright spirit, disgusted with us, goes away.

    Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied, including the famous Shadow, the term especially favored by Jungians for what we have tried to relegate to the basement of the personal unconscious because we would rather not own it as a part of ourselves. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is not only about recognizing and integrating aspects of the self that we have buried or denied; it is retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.

    In my own practice, I have come to distinguish five forms of soul loss or disconnection that call for healing. I have yet to encounter a human being who is immune to any of these.

 

Loss of vital energy

You suffer from chronic fatigue. You find yourself torpid and listless, reluctant to get out of bed. Your days seem drab and gray and joyless. Your immune system in blown and you seem to pick up every passing bug. There is something missing in you and you try to stuff the whole with sugar or booze.

 

Loss of younger selves

You have lost younger versions of yourself - the young child with abounding energy and that beautiful imagination, that fine romantic who was hurt or betrayed as a teen, that inner poet or businessman who wanted to make different life choices from the ones you made. These younger selves have gifts and energy you can use in your life today if only you can find out where they are and discover how to bring them back.

 

Loss of animal spirits

Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow ther natural path four eneries. Yet many of us have lost this primal connection, or know it only as a superficial wannabe symbolic thing that we look up in books and medicine cards without feeding and living every day.

 

Loss of ancestral soul

This is a two-edged affair. When we live oblivious to the fact that we are always in the presence of the ancestors - those of our bloodlines, those of the land where we live, and those of our spiritual kin in a broader sense - we are likely to be the plaything and even the tenement for entities we don't necessarily want to have near us. When we awaken to ancestral soul, we become ready to claim the connection with wisdom-keepers and protectors who can help us to re-establish healthy psychic boundaries and clear out what does not belong with us.

 

Loss of connection with the Greater Self

Ultimately we can only make peace between the many aspects of our selves, and follow a path of true spiritual evolution by opening or re-opening a direct and conscious connection with the Self on a higher level - the Self that is no stranger. When we clear the right space within our embodied selves, we may be ready for the deep and beautiful act of soul growing that I call spiritual enthronement, bringing a part of the Higher Self to live in our bodies and infuse our lives and our life choices with its radiance.

 

I have learned that dreams often show us where soul had gone, and offer paths by which it can be reached and encouraged to come home. Through the techniques of Active Dreaming, we can learn to help each other to become the shamans of our own souls and the healers of our own lives.

For much more on soul loss and soul recovery, please see Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Wrapped in Butterflies" by Robert Moss

In the presence of the numen

 

I dive again into a thick bilingual edition of Borges' poems. [1] Like a creature of the deep, a curious poem  titled “1891”, bobs up. It describes with exactitude a shady character with a knife in his waistcoat who is on his way to collect a debt and maybe to meet his own death. I nibble at words I do not know from the street argot. Esos changangos estan siempre amolando la paciencia.”These cheap guitars,” suggests the translator, “keep gnawing at the edges of his temper.” I open the book again to an astonishing eulogy of the German language. 

Then I find, early in the book, Borges long poem for the Moon, and how it will always escape the nets of the poets. I savor this verse in particular.

Siempre se pierde lo esencial. Es una
Ley de toda palabra sobre el numen.
No la sabrá eludir este resumen
De mi large comercia con la luna. 

In Alan S. Trueblood’s translation this becomes:

The essential thing is what we always miss.
From this law no one will be immune
nor will this account be an exception,
of my protracted dealings with the moon. 

-    He vanishes the critical word “numen”, thus fulfilling Borges’ law! And how essential this word “numen” is. It is indeed quite central to our understanding – within Western tradition – of the interplay of the sacred and the profane. Partly inspired by Rudolf Otto, Jung and Eliade both sought to trace the operations of synchronicity through the game of hide-and-seek played by the numinous.

The word numen, naturally, comes from the Romans. It is used to mean the presence or the will of a sacred power. Cicero uses the term to signify the "active power" of a god. [2] Ovid has  Numen inest  meaning “there is a god (or spirit) here.” [3] Its literal meaning is a “nod”, or “given the nod”.

Nil sine numine is the state motto of Colorado. “Not without the numen”. It derives from Virgil: non haec sine numine devum eveniunt (“these things do not come to pass without the will of Heaven”) [4] 

So, back to the Borges verse. I will try this:

We always lose the essential when we try
to find words to describe the numen.
I don’t know how to escape this law
in reporting my long engagement with the moon.

 And on to Rudolf Otto, who belied his Prussian appearance – Kaiser moustache, high-collared tunic, ramrod bearing – as a deep student of mystical experience. He insists that you cannot be taught the concept of the numinous; you must feel it. It “cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” [5] . “It cannot be ‘taught’, it must be ‘awakened’ from the spirit….In religion there is very much that can be taught…What is incapable of being so handed down is this numinous basis and background of religion, which can only be induced, incited, and aroused.” We require “a penetrative imaginative sympathy.” [6]

His effort is to convey “the feeling which remains when the concept fails, and to introduce a terminology which is not any the more loose or indeterminate for have necessarily to make use of symbols.” ]7]

“The numinous is felt as objective and outside the self." The feeling is of mystery edged with shudders, a mysterium tremendum. Feelings may span the spectrum from a gentle tide, through sudden eruption with spasms and convulsions, to “the strangest excitements” to “wild and demonic forms” to “hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of – whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.” [8]

Sophocles wrote of the experience of awe in the presence of the numen in Antigone, in a line which Otto renders as

Much there is that is weird; but nought is weirder than man. [9]

Otto also quotes Goethe’s Faust:

Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil,
Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefühl verteuere,
Ergriffen fuhlt tief das Ungeheuere. [10]

My free rendition:

Shuddering is the best part of being human
though the world can stifle our feelings
we are gripped by the weird sense of the tremendous

In the presence of the numen, we are gripped in our depths by something vast and uncanny.

References

1.  Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems ed. Alexander Coleman. (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).

2. Cicero, De divinatione 1.20 

3. Ovid, Fasti III, 296 

4. Virgil, Aeneid II, 777.

5. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy  trans. John W. Harvey. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) 7

6. ibid, 60

7. ibid, xxi

8. ibid, 11-13

9. ibid, 40

10. Goethe, Faust Part II, Act 1, scene v.

Magical Moon photo by Janne Loekkeberg