On Swan Wings

 

The swan is a symbol of the soul in Indian literature, and a ride for Brahma the creator. In dreams, we read in the Upanishads, the soul flies back and forth from the nest of the body like a "lone swan". Paramahamsa, "Supreme Swan", is a title given to enlightened spiritual teachers. 

The swan features in moving scenes of soul remembering - recollecting other lives and connections with other members of our soul family. When they come at the right time, such memories return (says the poet Kalidasa) like flights of migrating swans. 

There is a beautiful encounter in the Bhagavata Purana between a king who has been reborn as a woman and a friend from his previous life. The friend says, "Don't you remember your old friend? You and I, my dear, were two swans who lived together in the lake of the mind, until you left me to wander on earth. I created the illusion that made you think you were a man or a woman. Our true nature is as two swans."

Photo by Romy Needham

The Cave of the Dreaming God

 

A stranger gave us directions

at the mouth of the subway.

My friend and I heard him

but we had trouble with his accent

and disagreed about what he said.

The guitar man busking quarters heard

but claimed he had been there already.

Everyone else was on cellphones

or lost in headphone land.

 

"Get down, go down, find the Gatekeeper

who will ask you for the correct time.

There's only one right answer,

here or anywhere. Don't screw this up.

Then go west of certainty, north of comfort.

Take passage over the Jell-O sea.

Study, talk politely to demons.

and you may know the dreams of Time."

 

So we went down the tunnel and told the ticket man

who bared his teeth, "The only time is now."

He growled, but let us into ferry-land

where we took the Western Line

and sailed off the maps to the slow motion sea

that moves like tree sap dreaming of amber.

 

We came at last to the island where Chronos

lies bound in sleep. It took us only thirty years

of constant study and conversation with spirits

- but noone is counting here - to win entry

to the Cave of the Dreaming God.

 

In the slipstream of Time that is no time

possible histories flicker off and on;

ifs and might-have beens and might-bes,

memories of the future, roads not taken

in one world but followed somewhere else.

 

We learned not to look too long

at what we prefer not to see -

goosestepping Nazis in London,

plump Protestant ayatollahs ruling Hollywood,

Earth infested by bog-men and hungry ghosts

or ruled by insectoid dynasties from a hungry star.

To look here is to pluck from the quantum soup

a strand that becomes a species thought

and may become an event track in the serial world.

 

"Jus' like pickin a guitar" said the busker

when we came up from the underground.

So we'll keep the Cave of the Dreaming God

well-hidden, like a fleck of pyrite in a drop of amber

on the fob of a dead poet’s pocket watch.

- Robert Moss

 

An 18th century rabbi describes the night wanderings of the dream soul

 

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, playwright, Kabbalist and frequent astral traveler (1707-1746), also known as Ramchal, gives one of the clearest expositions in Western tradition on dreaming as soul experience. In his book Derech Hashem (The Way of God) he explains that "when we sleep, most of what happens is that our bodies rest and our brains are given the chance to sort out the thoughts of our day. However, something else occurs at the same time. The higher parts of our souls become slightly detached from our bodies. (This is why our first prayer upon awakening in the morning is thanking God for returning our souls to us (modeh ani).
    "Only the lowest part of our souls – the 'animal soul' all living creatures possess – stays with us overnight.) Once our souls depart our bodies, they are able to roam the spiritual planes of existence where they are most at home. While there, they may interact with other spiritual entities, such as angels, and may hear (or overhear) some of what the future holds in store for man." [Derech Hashem 3.1.6]
     While anthropologists following the “Swedish school” of Ernst Arbman have tracked the wanderings of the free soul, Luzzatto spoke of the freed soul, relased from the body and the lower self. In his conception in dreams "the portions of the soul from ruach (Spirit) and above them rise and sever themselves from the body. Only one portion, the nefesh, remains with the lower [animal] soul." The freed portions of the soul can then move about in the spiritual realm wherever they are allowed. They can interact and associate with such spiritual beings as the angels who oversee natural phenomena, some angels associated with prophecy, and shedim [demons].  
    While the anthropologists have been happy to use the word “image” (in the sense of the Greek eidolon rather than a representation) as a synonym for free soul, for the rabbi, the image is what the human imagination creates in an effort to bring down soul experiences on a higher level into the memory and understanding of the lower self.  What is learned by the higher soul descends to the animal soul through the imagination, which may confuse the content. So any dream apart from some special forms of prophecy is likely to contain “worthless information” as well as precious gifts.
    Once our souls depart our bodies, they are able to roam the spiritual planes of existence where they are most at home. While there, they may interact with other spiritual entities, such as angels, and may hear (or overhear) some of what the future holds in store for man. The message may be actual prophecy, or simply an omen – depending upon the level of being which communicates with the soul. That information might in turn trickle down into our consciousness and work their way into our dreams.

Luzzatto was variously celebrated as the leader of a kabbalistic-messianic confraternity in Padua, condemned as a deviant threat by rabbis in Venice and central and eastern Europe, and accepted by Portuguese Jews when he moved to Amsterdam, where they had found sanctuary. He faced recurring perseciution by conservative rabbis who arranged the destructionof his papers and forebade him to practice kabbalah. 
    Controversy started swirling around him early when, at age twenty – beardless and unmarried -  he claimed to have visions of a magid. The magid  or “speaker” is a spitritual teacher who may be an angel, a prophet or a divinely inspired individual, living or deceased. Luzzatto had no doubt he was in  contact with the angelic realms. These visions encouraged messianic aspirations and fed the idea that Luzzatto and his close associate Moshe Valle might be reincarnations of great figures from Jewish history. They formed a Holy Society of young enthusaists at the University pf Padua to discuss these revelations. This bred suspicion that they were reviving the kind of messianic movement that had roiled Jewish communities across Europe in the previous century under the leadership of Shabat Zvi, a self-proclaimed messiah who utmately betrayed his followers by converting to Islam under threat from the Ottoman Sultan.
    Moshe Valle’s mystical diary, discovered by Isaiah Tishby in the vaults of the British Museum, was recorded in the margins of his Bible commentaries. Entries often started with recorded dreams.

 

See Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, The Way of God trans. and ed. Aryeh Kaplan. Jerusalem and New York: Feldheim Publishers. Sixth edition, 1998. 

Illustration: Text-generated picture by RM with AI of the beardless 20-year-old Luzzatto having a vision of a magid in the Jewish ghetto of Padua.