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)

 

Dreaming with Shadow Fox and the Poison Dart Frog

From my travel journal:

I'm in the rainforest of Costa Rica, leading a seven-day retreat on "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at a wonderful resort called Sueño Azul (literally "Blue Dream", the local term for "daydream"). It's supposedly the dry season here, but it's raining harder than I have ever seen or heard rain come down. Then come sudden bright intervals of sunlight when - if they coincide with the early morning or gaps in the workshop schedule - I rush to swim loops and figures of eight in the pool, which is curvy and narrow-waisted like a woman's generous body.
   The sense of hearing is enlivened here. After sunset, a primal orchestra starts playing all night long. Whether some of the sounds are made by bird or frog, insect or gecko, is at first mysterious to the newcomer. There is the repeated sound of something mimicking a long wet kiss. There is a clacking as of roulette chips being set down on a casino table. There is gushing, plucking, tinkling, plopping, slapping, ticking. There is tapping that is exactly like a Morse code operator trying to get an urgent message though. There is the clicking of geckos after their prey, and a roar that could be a jaguar but proves to be the fierce warning sound of a howler monkey.
   Awake in the early hours on our first night here, I decide to journey with these sounds to learn about the energies of this land. I meet a Shadow Fox and a sorrowful priest - actually a Franciscan brother, to judge by his simple brown cassock, who prays to God to release him from this "green hell" that is una pulperia de los sentidos que esta abierto toda la noche. This translates as "a grocery store of the senses that is open all night long." I observe this sorrowful man from a few feet away, in his solitary hut in the rainforest where he lives among the Indians perhaps two centuries ago. He defends los indigenes but he is also afraid of them, especially their shamans. I follow his thoughts in his own language.
    Now I am looking at a little vermilion frog, jewel-bright and bright as poison. I see the same red color daubed round the eyes of a native who hunts game animals and members of rival tribes with blow-darts dipped in the venom of a poisonous frog.
    Two days later, on a narrow boat traveling low in the muddy waters on the Sarapiqui river, we pause by an ancient guassimo tree. Its roots are a many chambered city that started to rise from the earth three centuries ago. Our captain, who has the laser-sharp eyes of a native tracker, slips away to find a little poison-dart frog. He brings it on board on a large green leaf, like a ruby on a jeweler's velvet pad. The little frog has blue legs so it is described to the tourists as the "blue-jeaned poison-dart frog."
    My curiosity is stirred by the poison dart bit rather than the blue jeans. I ask the captain in Spanish (he speaks no English) if this little frog provided the poison for Indian blow-darts, as the name suggests. He confirms this. "They still use its poison for darts and also for arrows. And some of their hunters put red paint the same color around their eyes." He calls the frog a rana. He identifies the local tribes (I write this phonetically) as Huetteros and Blumandos. I am excited by this quick confirmation that I dreamed myself into this living landscape, human and animal, on that first night.
    The next day, I met the red-eyed rana shaman again, in a journey with the rain in which he brought me into a cavernous space inside a tree that his people use for ritual purposes. He offered me the ashes of one of his mentors - a great shaman - inside a cooked plantain leaf. I declined the honor. Though I understood that eating the ashes might turn me into a "made man" of this culture, there was a limit to how far I was willing to take this new dream connection!

When we were leaving the center to take a bus to the airport, the owners of  Sueño Azul came rushing after us. I had told them about my dreams and the encounter with the poison frog on the river. They had corrected my naming of the local tribes I had been told about and had brought old books and albums to show me pictures of Huetares and Borucas and their art and artifacts. Now my hosts thrust a bundle of wooden sticks into my hands. I looked and saw that I had been presented with an arsenal of primal weapons - spears, darts, arrows. My hosts told me that because I dreamed with the natives I should take something of them with me. I demurred that I could  not take weapons on a plane, even if they were wood rather than metal.
    "No te preocupes," I was told. "They will wrap everything for you at the airport." I was a litle uneasy as I boarded the bus, less uneasy than the pasengers arouind me. At the airoport, however, all was handled breezily. It cost me $5 to have the wepons of a poison dart shaman hunter placed in a tube and consigned to the checked luggage. Pura vida.

From my journal for February 4, 2009

The voiceover in dreams and ancient habits of reading

The voiceover in dreams, especially when we are reading text, suggests oneiric reversion to the habits of our literate early ancestors, who typically read aloud rather than silently. In his Confessions, Augustine describes the remarkable sight of Ambrose (who was also made a saint) reading silently.  Vox autem et lingua quiescebant, “His voice and tongue maintained silence.” Augustine conjectured that he read in this unusual way because he often had other people coming and going around him and wanted to discourage them from interrupting his studies with questions and comments. [Confessions 6.3]
    Speaking the words aloud while you had your head in a scroll or codex was the default mode of reading in the ancient world. It seems this was still the case when Augustine wrote his Confessions around 400. In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel maintains that St.Augustine’s description of St. Ambrose’s reading habit is the first definite instance of silent reading recorded in western literature.
     Paul Saenger an expert on medieval manuscripts and a curator of rare books at Chicago's Newberry Library, believes that reading aloud was a practical necessity, given the form of early manuscripts. In his recent book Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading Saenger contends that the practice of transcribing Greek and Latin manuscripts without spaces, in scriptio continua, made reading silently a wearisome and excruciatingly difficult task. "It wasn't literally impossible to read silently, but the notation system was so awkward that the vast majority of readers would have needed to sound out the syllables, if only in a muffled voice."  Scriptio continua looks like this:

    It was only at the end of the seventh century, when Irish monks introduced regular word separation into medieval manuscripts, that quick and silent reading became easy and agreeable. A celebrated example is the Book of Kells.    

    I notice that when I read text in dreams – which I do very frequently, as in waking life – the words are often spoken out loud, in my mind. Sometimes the narrator seems to speak in a different voice. More often, I hear my own voice, as if I am reading aloud. This makes it much easier for me to follow and retain text than it might be if the lines were passing only in front of my dreaming eyes. When other dream researchers report that it is supposedly difficult to read and remember written material in dreams, I am incredulous, since I manage to understand and bring back so much text from my own dreams. But maybe this is easier for those of us who maintain, in dreams, the ancient default habit of reading aloud, creating the right spaces and rhythms for understanding and remembering.

Above: St. Ambrose reading silently
Below: word separation in the Book of Kells

Death is lonely in company

Death is lonely in company.
He is always the unwanted guest.
The party stops when he comes in.
Bubbles go flat, petals drop from the flowers,
pink leaves the cheeks under any amount of Rouge.
People don't see his good side.
They see the skull without the skin.
They see teeth and tusks and sickles.
They taste metal and smell decay.
So he dresses up to meet awful expectations.
Death needs a friend who can see beyond the masks.
I think his friend is the shaman.

- Robert Moss

Photo: Autochrome of Tibetan skeleton dancer taken by Joseph F. Rock in 1925. A Buddhist monk is performing the Durdak Garcham, “Dance of the Lords of the Cemetery”. 

Where Past Lives Are Selected for Recall

I am in a village of terraced houses, in the British Isles a few centuries ago. I have come here to investigate my possible past life connections with a friend. This may be one of a number of excursions I have made overnight, to different landscapes in different times.

    I leave my friend in the village and walk a path towards the woods beyond the fields. The woods are lovely, deep and dark and inviting. But at the edge of the wildwood, something is moving. It is a black snake, slithering across the path, from right to left, at a diagonal. This snake is huge. When its head reaches the other side of the path, it straightens the body to move parallel to the path. I can now see at least twenty feet of its body, and more is coming.
   I hesitate. Though I don’t think this snake is venomous, I’m not sure I want to get any closer. I am ready to turn back, when I see the head of a silver wolf among the shadows of the forest. The wolf is staring intently at me. I recognize a friend, and know it is safe, and maybe essential, to go forward.
   I step over the snake, as if it is merely a garden hose.
   At the instant I do this, I am transported to another level.
   The scene changes completely. I am now in some kind of vessel, like a spaceship or orbiting observation platform. Two men are working the control panels, under huge windows. One remains at his work. The other stands up quickly, to see who has entered their space. He is clearly very surprised to find me here, but also friendly and welcoming.
    I know, before words are exchanged, that this vessel is a “relay station” and that the work of its controllers is to supervise and help to select the past life memories that become accessible to people living on the Earth plane. I understand, in this moment, that it is very important that past life memories are meted out carefully, so that we are not overwhelmed by a rush of information and emotion that could bind or distract us in our present lives.

I woke from this dream excited and full of active curiosity. Silver Wolf is a name I gave to a native shaman who can appear as man or wolf. He once gave me indelible instruction on the nature of various aspects of the soul and what happens to them after death. Black snakes have sometimes featured in my dreams as important boundary markers, between different worlds as well as different states of consciousness. To gain entry to an earlier time and fulfill an assignment in Celtic lands that once seemed urgently important to me, I once had to move beyond a seething mass of black snakes.

                                                        

If you want to know about reincarnation, start by studying how you can rebirth yourself within your present life, and then how you deal with what you were before.
    If you think you are connected to personalities in other times – that you have past lives and future lives – then consider the possibility that it is all going on now and that you can reach to those other possible selves, mind to mind, for mutual benefit.
    Don’t trap yourself in any story, from this life or any other, that binds and confines you. In this moment of Now, you are free to claim a bigger and braver story.
    Try to read the whole pattern from the perspective of your Greater Self, at the hub of all your personalities. 
    You stand at the center of all times. Use that knowledge. 

- Excerpt  from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 

 

 

In the Voice of the Songbird

I am Marcella, called the Songbird because of my voice and because I can make men’s bodies sing. I can write my story in my own hand, because my father paid for a tutor. He was a merchant who sailed to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.
     Bruno brings me figs and young green olives of Lucca, the best of the new harvest. The cloth of gold that trims my dress belonged to my mother. The mad monk of Florence tried to kill her for wearing it, under his sumptuary laws. Witch, they called her, as they call me, though none dares to raise a hand against me so long as I have the favor of the bishop. I confess that I sewed the mouth of a toad shut to punish a calumniator for speaking against me and to silence his abuses, and that I melted a wax imago of Cosimo’s organ after he raped me.
     I will never marry, but I know men and they know me. There is no one in the city as practiced in the arts of love, though there are acts I will not perform, not even for the bishop.
    Bruno will guard my body with his life, and he is as strong as a bear. But I know I will not be allowed the fullness of my years. I have no wish to survive the withering of my body, still firm and juicy as a maiden’s after forty summers.
    I will heed the wishes of my sisters of the Hive. We are about in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message.

~

I wrote these lines after leading a group journey to real place in the Imaginal Realm, a Chamber of Mirrors where you can look into the lives of personalities in other times who are part of your multidimensional family. Participants in the workshop were asked to write an autobiographical statement in the voice of a personality of another time. The voice that wanted to speak through me was that of Marcella. Her reference to her mother's persecution by a "mad monk" (evidently Savonarola, a Dominican who ruled Florence and staged the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities before he was excommunicated and executed in 1498) suggests she lived in 16th century Italy. I am glad to know her, because in most of my impressions of past lives closely associated with my own, I have found myself linked to men, typically men of power.
     Where are the women? I have often asked myself. Oh, there is that woman of the future; I feel her even now, as I write. She is a priestess and a scientist, working to restore our world, seven generations into the future. Dreaming is central to her practice and that of her Order, and I am driven by a sense of obligation to her, the obligation - through my work as a dream teacher - to help make her possible.
    Perhaps Marcella and I will now be able to share gifts. In psychological terms, such episodes may mean that I am getting more deeply in touch with my female side, and I would be happy with that. Except that the encounter also feels transpersonal. Jane Robert's Seth insists that "the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences. Abilities cannot be developed by following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood." Perhaps I am making a little progress.
     Marcella hints at an Order of women content to call themselves a Hive. I have encountered this language, and similar women, in other times and other lands, "in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message", just as Marcella says.

Illustration: Portrait of Beatrice d'Este by Bartolemeo Veneto (1510) Public Domain

Where Dream Worlds Are Lifeworlds and Anthropologists Break the Glass

 In his book Ways of Knowing, Canadian anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet reports from the dream world of the Dene Tha of northern Alberta. Here it is understood that "the mind resides transiently in 'someone’s body' kezi, and permanently in 'someone’s spirit or soul', key-uné." Goulet tells us that Dene Tha conceive of dreaming, sickness and death as so many journeys of the soul. "Dreaming involves the soul’s journeying away from the body to explore areas in our land, to engage in a medicine fight with other powers, or momentarily to spend time in the other land in the company of dead relatives. At the end of each journey, when one wakes up, one remembers the events that took place beyond the confines of the body. …Sickness may be induced by a prolonged absence of the soul from the body, in which case Dene Tha healers can be called on to retrieve the soul, bring it back to the body, and restore health. Death is the definitive separation of the mortal body and the enduring immortal soul." [1] 
    Goulet is a leading practitioner and advocate of what my extraordinary friend the late Barbara Tedlock called "participatory observation", in which the ethnologist does not hesitate to dream with the people they are studying, to practice their rituals, meet their spirits and share dreams both ways. In a pathbreaking essay, Barbara wrote that there has been a major shift in cultural anthropological methodology away from interviewing indigenous dreamers to gather reports for statistical content analysis. “Instead, anthropologists today are relying more on participant observation, in which they interact within natural communicative contexts of dream sharing, representation, and interpretation. In such contexts the introduction of an anthropologist's own recent dreams is quite natural, even expected.” [2] Barbara and her husband Dennis entered the dream worlds of the Quiche Maya and the Zuni in this way. [3]
    As a young ethnologist, Goulet chose the Guajiro [4] of northern Colombia as the people he wished to study. At the start of his fieldwork, he asked to be permitted to stay in a village where the people spoke only Guajiro so he could learn the language by total immersion. The question from the elders came back: Does he know how to dream? They accepted him when assured that he did. He then found himself immersed not only in a different language, but in a different way of dreaming. Each morning, he joined an extended family of fourteen people in the kitchen area to share coffee and dreams. The sharing began when an adult asked “Jamüsü pülapüin,?” “How were your dreams?”  Family members then took turns to recount their dreams. The grandmother was usually the one to comment. [5]
    Goulet had only a limited understanding of what was being shared until he started dreaming in similar ways. He could now grasp that for the Guajiro, as for most if not all indigenous peoples, the dream world is a real world, a lifeworld no less real than ordinary reality and sometimes more so. Things that happen in the dream world are real experiences, not symbolic "contents:" for analysis. Goulet tells us, "I began to share Guajiro-like dreams, dreams that contained elements of the Guajiro world."[6]
     When he lived with the Dene Tha, Goulet learned their ways of "knowing with the mind" communicating without speaking, seeing without ordinary eyes, traveling without moving. He knew he was in on a night when, troubled by the smoke of a fire ceremony in a native lodge, he watched his energy double get up and fan the fire the proper way with his hat.
     He makes a passionate case for participatory anthropology, supported by his first-hand experience. In anthropological fieldwork, Goulet tells us, “ it is possible, and even useful, for the ethnographer to experience this qualitatively different world of ghosts and spirits, and to incorporate such experiences in ethnographic accounts.”  [7] He calls to his fellow-ethnographers Go on, break the glass.
   “Anthropologists may do more than listen to what others say about their lives. Anthropologists may pay attention to their own lives, including their inner lives, and listen to other peoples' response to their accounts of their dreams and/or visions experienced while living among them” And then they can publish! “An interpretive synthesis of data pertaining to another society and culture may fruitfully include the anthropologist's accounts of his/her own dreams and visions as they inform his or her interaction with others in their lifeworld.” [8]
     This is the surely the remedy for the phenomenon observed in the South Pacific where it is still said that “when the anthropologists arrive, the spirits leave.” Alas, reports of participatory observation are still far from standard in the literature

 

References

1.      Jean-Guy A. Goulet, Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Dene Tha. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p.142

2.      Barbara Tedlock, “The New Anthropology of Dreaming”  Dreaming, Vol 1(2), Jun 1991, p.161

3.      Barbara Tedlock, “Zuni and Quiche dream sharing and interpreting”  in Tedlock (ed) Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992 pp.105-131

4.  An indigenous people of the Guajira peninusla in northern Colombia and northwestern Venezuala. Today generally called the Wayuu. 

5. Jean-Guy A. Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Indigenous Lifeworlds: An Experiential Approach” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, p. 177.   

6.   Ibid, p. 178 

7.      Ibid, p. 171.    

8.  Ibid, pp. 173-4. See also David E. Young & Jean-Guy Goulet (eds) Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998. In their introduction the editors of Being Changed note that "experiences which may be extraordinary for Western-trained anthropologists may be commonplace for most traditional peoples around the world" - and, we might add, for active dreamers anywhere who have not fallen into the trap of reductionist thinking about dreaming and the mobility of soul. Goulet and Young go on to observe that "extraordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one reality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are multiple realities — or at least multiple ways of experiencing the world."

 

Photo: Bistcho Lake, northern Alberta

Psychic sports in Tibet

 

What an amazing spiritual adventurer was Alexandra David-Néel, the Belgian-French "lady lama" who brought thrilling accounts of Magic and Mystery in Tibet to the West. I reopened that book and found myself with Naropa once again when he was interrupted by a dakini while engaged in black magic. She appeared in a corner of a magic diagram he had constructed to effect the psychic assassination of a rajah. The dakini, or khadoma ("she who moves through the air")  gave Naropa such a good scare that he changed his ways and endured years of hardship and humiliation in order to enter the service of the mahasiddhi Tilopa .
    Naropa was a Brahmin of Kashmir who was deeply offended by his rajah. He decided to kill the prince by black magic. He shut himself up in an isolated house and began what Tibetans call a dragpoi dubthab, a magical rite to cause death or injury. He was interrupted by a khadoma, a “mother fairy” who appeared at the corner of the magical diagram he had constructed. She asked if he was able to send the spirit of the rajah to a happy place in another world, or bring it back into the body and revive that body. Gambopa confessed he could do neither. 
    The khadoma cautioned him that in that case he would suffer profoundly in one of the purgatories. Terrified, Naropa asked how he could avoid this fate. The khadoma told him to seek out Tilopa and beg for initiation into the “Short Path” that frees a man from the consequence of his actions by the revelation of their true nature and can bring the attainment of buddhahood in one single life.
     So Naropa went to Bengal, where Tilopa lived. He was received with rudeness and practical jokes. Tilopa violated all rules, took many forms, and often Naropa failed to recognize him. When finally Tilopa allowed contact to be made – when Naropa found him lying like a corpse beside a funeral pyre – he taught Naropa nothing. He merely allowed him to trail along behind him and beg for food for his master. He was given disgusting assignments. He was told to drink raw sewage and had to endure torture, with wooden splints pushed under his fingernails.
    Enlightenment finally came when the master took off his shoe and whacked Naropa in the face with it. He saw the stars, and the meaning of the Short Path. [1]  

Before I read her books, I had thought of Mme. David-Néel as one of those eccentric Brits who went native in the days of the Raj. In fact, she was born in Belgium and the last part of her name (from her husband) has an acute accent on the first E, left off in most English editions.
     Her travelogue presents Lamaism (a better name than Tibetan Buddhism) as quite different from other forms of Buddhism because it became a theocracy and because of the emphasis on what she calls “psychic sports” and high and low magic. She describes the abuses by which a guru seeks to establish total authority over his apprentic. She describes gruesome rituals of necromancy in which the practitioner revives a corpse, wrestles with it and – if he wins the contest – bites off the dead man’s tongue, which becomes a powerful tool. (Its exact uses are not described). There is the practice of chod, or “severing” in which the performer gives his body to be torn apart by wild animals, demons and hungry ghosts in a ritual which – in the Tibetan mind – is not symbolic but literal.
    Despite the teachings that all realities are generated by mind, many things going on here, including the multitude of ghosts and demons who infest David-Néel's Tibet, do not appear (to almost anyone) to be merely thought-forms.
    Buddhism maintains that there is no individual soul or spirit that survives death, yet in Tibet religious practice seems at odds with this teaching. Famously, there  is the succession of tulkus, held to be reincarnations of high lamas (and others). After the death of a high lama, the search is on for his tulku. This normally gets under way two years after the death. He may have left clues. Seers are called in. An infant who may be the tulku will be tested; he has to identify which, in a selection of personal items, belonged to the deceased lama. The lama’s special drinking cup is the most important of these items.· 
     Then there is the practice of phowa which involves transferring the personality to another reality - or another body in this world. 

1. Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet. (New York: Dover, 1971) pp. 170-8

  

When you feel you're a character in a novel someone else is writing

Do you ever have the feeling you are a character in a novel someone else is writing? The crazy-brilliant collector of anomalies, Charles Fort, offered the suggestion "that Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive – like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist." For those who have forgotten their Greek myths: Momus is the god of mockery and satire who was kicked out of Olympus because the other gods couldn't stand his savage humor. The quote is from Fort's The Book of the Damned. Its contents are less sinister, but possibly more weird, than the title suggests. By "damned", he was referring - with Momus-like mockery - to facts and ideas excluded from discussion by conventional thinking and mainstream science, like fish falling from the sky. The trick is, of course, to become authors - or at least co-authors - of our own life stories, and determine what genre we wish to inhabit. When I write fiction, I know that it is for real when a character comes alive and tries to run off with the story. In life, I sometimes feel like one of those runaway characters. Right now I am very curious to know who came up with the initial plot. In other words, I am a character in search of his author. There is a serious risk for a character who embarks on this quest. The author may have given up on you or forgotten your existence. Once contact is made, your author may decide you to write you out of his story and put Finis on your current life page. So my assignment grows. As a novelist, I create characters. As a character, I must play a larger game. I must seek to create, or at least re-create, my author.

Illustration: Momus as the tarot Fool in an eighteenth-century deck.

You are in the afterlife now

 

In this part of Manhattan, on a mild sunny day, you can imagine you are in a village, even seventy blocks north of Greenwich Village. I stop into an old-time two-fisted bar and order a martini, straight up, from an approving bartender. The couple who take the stools beside me are red from an island vacation, sporting sunglasses and bright prints. They ask for piña coladas.The bartender snarls, “We don’t serve none of them fruit drinks here.” This is precious, in an era when other establishments pretend that something made with chocolate can be called a martini. My drink is perfectly chilled. 
    I see across the Big Pond to a friend who is burning juniper in an old-time ritual on a hill above the Baltic Sea. The water gleams behind her, through pines and silver birches. An eagle owl soars overhead, searching. Her eyes are searching the juniper smoke. Can she see me in the shapes that form? Is she trying to call something through? 
     I toast her, and the Sisters, with the last of my gin. I give the bartender a $5 tip. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
     I have an appointment on the other side of the island, at The Dead Poet. 
     I walk across the park. 
     On the corner next to The Dead Poet, a panhandler with black eyes, beaked like a crow, has come up with a creative line. He croaks at bypassers, “You are in the afterlife.” 
     A well-fed lady squeaks and hurries by. A man in a suit looks aghast. He pulls cash from his pocket and drops a large bill in the beggar’s cup.
      I lean against a mailbox, watching the pattern repeat. “You are in the Underworld,” the wild-eyed panhandler riffs on his theme. People either rush by, pretending not to hear, or they tremble and throw money at him, hoping to buy a Get Out of Jail Free card.
      It’s my time. They are waiting for me in The Dead Poet. 
      Crow Man is watching my feet when he caws, “You are in the afterlife.” 
      “Finally,” I say very clearly and distinctly. “It is a pleasure to meet a man who understands where he is.”
      Crow Man looks in my face and starts to tremble. He holds out his cup, but not for me to donate. He is offering me the payment for the Ferryman.

 

[from a 15 minute timed writng exercise]

Photos by RM