The swan’s cure – a wonderful script for imaginal healing from Aldous Huxley

 

He's a cynical, worldly Englishman and right now his body is broken and screaming with pain. He's fallen from a cliff and he's on his back in a hut on an island in Southeast Asia, racked with fever. He is visited by a beautiful bronze-colored girl in a sarong who talks like she's been educated at Oxford before or after spending a year as assistant to a bodhisattva. She knows things about healing that his culture doesn't know and his mind is absolutely unwilling to accept. But she finds a chink in the closed door of that cynical mind, using memory.
    He is from England. Does he know the city of Wells? Of course he knows Wells, he snaps back at her.  She says she used to go walking there, by the water. There was an extraordinary sense of peace. And when she closes her eyes now she can see it all so clearly, green grass and golden sunlight on the stones of the church across the moat, and she can hear the bells and the jackdaws in the tower. Can he hear them too? Yes, he can hear the birds. 
    In this way, in her soft lilting voice, chanting more than speaking, she leads the patient inside a scene he remembers until he is there as well as on his sickbed. He can see the daisies and dandelions in the grass, the austere geometry of the cathedral tower challenging the tender blue of the sky.
    "And the swans."
     Yes, the swans. Impossibly beautiful, yet entirely real. He sees the curve of the swans' white breasts lifting and parting dark waters.
    "Effortlessly floating."
     The words give him deep satisfaction. As the dreamy voice leads him, he finds himself floating with the swans, on that smooth surface between darkness below and tender blue above, between here and far away, between one world and another. 
     Floating like a white bird on the water, he allows himself to slip into the flow of a great smooth silent river, allowing the sleeping river of life to carry him into a profound peace.
     The patient drifts off, contented, as the voice continues to chant. Above the river, he sees huge white clouds and at her suggestion, he floats up towards them until he is streaming on a river of air, up into the freshness of high mountains. He feels a delicious cool wind on his skin, and falls deeper into sleep, his fever broken.

 

I have paraphrased an extraordinary passage in Aldous Huxley's last novel,Island (first published in 1962) that is a magnificent description of imaginal healing. When Susila, the beautiful young healer, reports to her doctor father on what she did with the patient (the cynical journalist Will Farnaby) she says "he went off more quickly than expected" because she opened his imagination by calling him to a place in England that he knew. She explains that she worked with indirect rather than direct suggestions. "They're always better." She gave him a different body image, one that suggested grace and strength to carry him beyond his present injury, so it became "a miserable thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing."
     There is a model here for how to grow a vision of healing for someone who is in need of images to make the body well. Start by taking them through the doorway of a life memory. Don't harp on physical symptoms. Give the body - as well as the mind - of the patient living images strong and graceful and fresh enough to shift it beyond its current complaints, as the swan glides on the water or lifts off to claim the sky.
     I teach a similar practice I call dream transfer, in the understanding that we can gift a dream - a healing image, a vision of possibility, even a road map to the afterlife - to someone in need of a dream. 

photo by Romy Needham

The Flashlight and the Mail Drop: Two Modes of Dream Precognition

I make a practice of asking of any dream, Could any part of this be played out in the future, literally or symbolically? I am then alert for any follow up to the dream in ordinary reality. Over decades now my journal has been, in addition to all else, a log of precognitive and premonitory dreams. The hundreds of match-ups between dreams and subsequent events that I have tagged confirming that we have the ability to visit or receive glimpses of the possible future. 

I scanned two dream reports in the early hours this morning putting that question, Could any part of this play out in the future? 

Eastern Blessing Ritual

In the first dream I lead a procession in an Eastern country around a holy site, perhaps a cemetery. We are clad in simple white and yellow garments. I receive inner guidance that we must address our request for blessing to three revered figures, one a prophet or saint, another a statesman. We pause at a place where I kneel and touch my forehead to the ground as I solicit blessings from these ancestors. My words are chorused by the group. 

Turkish Airline Official Gets Ahead 

In the second dream I need to sort out a return flight at an airport in Turkey. The airport is oddly deserted. Only one person is ahead of me in line and I expect to get quick service. However, the airline agent leaves his post at soon as he finishes with the customer ahead of me. He turns into an outsize, bronze-colored head hanging on a wall. It seems this is how he likes to take his breaks. I wave and call. When I get his attention, he is apologetic and respectful. It takes a while to go through the details of itinerary, seat selection and documentation. 

Neither dream stirred strong emotions. I enjoyed the mystery and exotic elements in the first dream. It felt like a vividly real experience in a place otherwise unknown to me, in this world or another reality altogether. It seemed most improbable to me that I would find myself there in the future in ordinary reality, except perhaps in the pages of a book or via a screen. You are very unlikely to see me in that posture of prayer. 

After recording my dreams, I checked my email. At that moment, A new message came in from academia.edu, a site for scholarly research that sends me an unsolicited recommendation with a link to an academic article every day. The title of today’s recommendation was “The Blessing Ritual of Assam”. I would normally have deleted the message – I have to ration my reading time – but because of my dream I downloaded the pdf. 

The article, by a postgrad at the University of Delhi, describes how in the northeast state of Assam people seeking a blessing kneel, heads lowered, before their intended benefactors and place their hands on their feet. The formulas of the lead speaker are chorused by the group. I don’t recall any placing of hands on feet in my dream, and I don’t know that the location was Assam. Still, I had never received a message about a blessing ritual before, and the resemblance to my dream was strong enough for me to feel that the dream previewed the article. Did the article arrive in my dream inbox before it arrived in my email? Without the dream, would I have read the article? (Probably not) Without the dream, would the article even have arrived? 

I turned my questions to the second dream. I have traveled to Turkey several times and might possibly visit again. So I marked my second report “PC” for “precognitive” (more precisely, possibly precog) despite the anomalous part where the airline agent becomes an outsize head on a wall. This could be a visual pun for someone who wants to get ahead or is swollen headed. The transformations of the airline agent were less surprising to me than the state of the airport. Even in the midst of pandemic or revolution, it is hard for me to imagine that Istanbul airport- where I have waited in the longest lines I have ever seen - could ever be as empty as that. 

My dream catch this morning was small fish. Nothing of much importance going on here, no high emotions aroused. However, it’s fun playing games with dreams for the sake of the play, even more so when this turns into valuable data, the data of state-specific science. In writing about dream precognition in his excellent 1964 book Man and Time, J.B.Priestley observed that the difficulty in assembling evidence involves  “the trivial and the terrible”. People tend to disregard dreams they find trivial and run away from dreams they find terrible. The way forward is to decide – if the game appeals to you – that you will record all dreams in a journal and revisit your reports after the passage of time to see whether waking life caught up with the dreams. 

My little dream reports from last night may be examples of two modes of dream precognition, which we can call shining a torch and checking the mail. I am quite certain we have intuitive radar that scans our environment across space and time, reading the land and locating challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is part of our human survival kit. This kind of intuition comes especially alive in dreams, when we lay aside our cognitive inhibitions. 

In his pioneer study An Experiment with Time, J.W.Dunne compared dream precognition to walking along a path in a darkened landscape holding a flashlight in front of you. My Turkish airport dream may be this sort of experience, though I won’t know that until I return to air travel. I don't expect the scene to be reproduced in every detail, not only because of the bronze head but because dream memories are often mixed. Details blur as we retrieve them, we mix up bits and pieces from different scenes, and our takeaways may reflect our reactions and feelings around a future event rather than the event itself. 

It takes no effort to see that my Blessing Ritual dream fits the model of checking the mail. Our future self may send us messages back across time. I picture this as the heap of mail I used to find when the mailman pushed letters through the slot in the front door. In the dream state, we go through the mail and pick out a few items. As we surface from dreams, our half-awake editor, true to what Aldous Huxley called the "reducing valve" of the brain, selects a smaller number of items. or censors them altogether.

There are other ways of understanding dream precognition. The one I like best is the most ancient: that dreaming is traveling. On any night soul or consciousness may travel across time as well as to other dimensions. “Dreams are the news that is told to us by the souls when they come back,” a Kwakiutl shaman told Åke Hultkrantz. So we might see our dream images as postcards from a journey, which could be to another time or another world.

Lightly, lightly: Teachings of a Dancing God in Aldous Huxley's Last Novel

 

"Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing. It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy. Within it, Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away. It is his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing, like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his playground is infinite space."

I am quoting from a beautiful description of a statue of Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, in Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island.
    In cast metal Indian figures of Shiva Nataraja, the oldest of which date from the 10th century, he is shown with four arms, which evoke the four cardinal directions. Each hand holds a a symbolic object or makes a symbolic gesture, a mudra.
    In the upper right hand is a drum shaped like an hourglass. It symbolizes the creation of worlds, which begin with sound. It is beating the patterns of making, and the rhythms of Shiva's dance as Kala, Lord of Time. In the shape of the drum - two interpenetrating triangles - we also see the union of dynamic opposites and of male and female, lingam and yoni. When they are separated, the universe ends.

In his upper left hand, Shiva holds fire, understood here to be the destroyer of worlds. In Hindu mythology, our present world will end in flame.
    Shiva's lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. The gesture signifies: "Don't be afraid." The Sanskrit name for this mudra is abhaya, meaning "without fear".
    Shiva's lower left hand points to his feet. What's going on down there? His right foots is planted on a horrible dwarf who is the embodiment of ignorance, envy and greed. The Lord of the Dance is stamping on this demon, breaking his back. But his finger is not pointing at the demon dwarf. It is pointing at his left foot, which he is raising high from the ground. That raised foot, lifted so high it seems to defy the law of gravity, symbolizes moksha, liberation from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. The gesture of the pointing hand resembles the outstretched trunk of an elephant and evokes elephant-headed Ganesha, Shiva's son, the one who opens and closes the doors and paths of this world. 

"For Nataraja it's all play," writes Huxley. "And the play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless. He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-moksha, his infinite and eternal bliss."

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…"

  

Image: Shiva as Lord of the Dance. Bronze, Chola dynasty (10th century) from Tamil Nadu. Now in Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

 

 

 

The dancing god

"Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing. It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy. Within it, Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away. It is his lila, his cosmic play.Playing for the sake of playing, like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his playground is infinite space."

I am quoting from a beautiful description of a statue of Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, in Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island.
    In cast metal Indian figures of Shiva Nataraja, the oldest of which date from the 10th century, he is shown with four arms, which evoke the four cardinal directions. Each hand holds a a symbolic object or makes a symbolic gesture, a mudra.
    In the upper right hand is a drum shaped like an hourglass. It symbolizes the creation of worlds, which begin with sound. It is beating the patterns of making, and the rhythms of Shiva's dance as Kala, Lord of Time. In the shape of the drum - two interpenetrating triangles - we also see the union of dynamic opposites and of male and female, lingam and yoni. When they are separated, the universe ends.

    In his upper left hand, Shiva holds fire, understood here to be the destroyer of worlds. In Hindu mythology, our present world will end in flame.
    Shiva's lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. The gesture signifies: "Don't be afraid." The Sanskrit name for this mudra is abhaya, meaning "without fear".
    Shiva's lower left hand points to his feet. What's going on down there? His right foots is planted on a horrible dwarf who is the embodiment of ignorance, envy and greed. The Lord of the Dance is stamping on this demon, breaking his back. But his finger is not pointing at the demon dwarf. It is pointing at his left foot, which he is raising high from the ground. That raised foot, lifted so high it seems to defy the law of gravity, symbolizes moksha, liberation from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. The gesture of the pointing hand resembles the outstretched trunk of an elephant and evokes elephant-headed Ganesha, Shiva's son, the one who opens and closes the doors and paths of this world.

"For Nataraja it's all play," writes Huxley. "And the play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless. He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-moksha, his infinite and eternal bliss."

The swan's cure: imaginal healing in Aldous Huxley

Swans ring the bell at the bishop's palace in Wells

He's a cynical, worldly Englishman and right now his body is broken and screaming with pain. He's fallen from a cliff and he's on his back in a hut on an island in Southeast Asia, racked with fever. He is visited by a beautiful bronze-colored girl in a sarong who talks like she's been educated at Oxford before or after spending a year as assistant to a bodhisattva. She knows things about healing that his culture doesn't know and his mind is absolutely unwilling to accept. But she finds a chink in the closed door of that cynical mind, using memory.
     He is from England. Does he know the city of Wells? Of course he knows Wells, he snaps back at her.  She says she used to go walking there, by the water. There was an extraordinary sense of peace. And when she closes her eyes now she can see it all so clearly, green grass and golden sunlight on the stones of the church across the moat, and she can hear the bells and the jackdaws in the tower. Can he hear them too? Yes, he can hear the birds.
    In this way, in her soft lilting voice, chanting more than speaking, she leads the patient inside a scene he remembers until he is there as well as on his sickbed. He can see the daisies and dandelions in the grass, the austere geometry of the cathedral tower challenging the tender blue of the sky.
    "And the swans."
    Yes, the swans. Impossibly beautiful, yet entirely real. He sees the curve of the swans' white breasts lifting and parting dark waters.
    "Effortlessly floating."
    The words give him deep satisfaction. As the dreamy voice leads him, he finds himself floating with the swans, on that smooth surface between darkness below and tender blue above, between here and far away, between one world and another.
    Floating like a white bird on the water, he allows himself to slip into the flow of a great smooth silent river, allowing the sleeping river of life to carry him into a profound peace.
    The patient drifts off, contented, as the voice continues to chant. Above the river, he sees huge white clouds and at her suggestion, he floats up towards them until he is streaming on a river of air, up into the freshness of high mountains.He feels a delicious cool wind on his skin, and falls deeper into sleep, his fever broken.

I have paraphrased an extraordinary passage in Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island (first published in 1962) that is a magnificent description of imaginal healing. When Susila, the beautiful young healer, reports to her doctor father on what she did with the patient (the cynical journalist Will Farnaby) she says "he went off more quickly than expected" because she opened his imagination by calling him to a place in England that he knew. She explains that she worked with indirect rather than direct suggestions. "They're always better." She gave him a different body image, one that suggested grace and strength to carry him beyond his present injury, so it became "a miserable thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing."
     There is a model here for how to grow a vision of healing for someone who is in need of images to make the body well. Start by taking them through the doorway of a life memory. Don't harp on physical symptoms. Give the body - as well as the mind - of the patient living images strong and graceful and fresh enough to shift it beyond its current complaints, as the swan glides on the water or lifts off to claim the sky.