On Spiritual Enthronement, or Fusion with an Aspect of the Higher Self

 

Plotinus said that our most important tutelary spirit is the self on a level above the one we are on. I have found this to be true. I think of this self as my double on the balcony, because in half-dream states I have encountered him on a high roof terrace, a vantage point from which it is possible to find patterns in the confusion of life below and approach life choices with detachment and even a sense of divine comedy.
      I meet this life teacher in interior dialogues, above all, once again, in the half-dream state that researchers call hypnagogia but is more elegantly described as dorveille in Old French, dormiveglia in curent Italian. I feel that at a tremendous turning point in my life, our minds and energies merged.
      Let me try to make a general obseravtion before I turn this discussion over to the record of a conversation I made many years ago. . 
     As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with a higher self and now progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

    “Take heart. I am with you always. I know you better than you know yourself.” This was the opening of communication with an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two.”
     This was the essence of communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995. Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify, and apply in ordinary reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers. What was coming through now was direct knowledge.
     “Your mind on my purpose.”
      That was familiar language, the way this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self that was no stranger gave me some very clear information:

    "When fusion takes place between a focus personality and the Higher Self - that is to say, the control personality on the plane directly above the focus personality -the result is a step forward in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.

    "This progression has taken humans from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects — to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane. Indeed, from this point of view, you are attending the emergence of a new species.Your physical equipment imposes limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of physiological change — in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of cells, and, naturally, in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher, clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise on the planes."

       This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years, I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer than your jugular vein.”

Text adapted from "The Double on the Balcony", chapter 31 of The Boy Who Died and CameBack: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Path to the Higher Self" by Robert Moss

 

 

The Double on the Balcony: Conversations with a Witness Self

 

It may be that our most important life guide is no stranger, but a self on a higher level. The Sufis talk beautifully of the “soul of the soul”. Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist philosopher whose teachings were introduced to me by one of my inner companions during my adolescence, instructed that the life teacher, or “tutelary daimon”, is a self on a level above the one where we are currently operating. Plotinus maintained that each of us is a “cosmos”, with access to a vast spectrum of possible levels of consciousness, with the power to choose the levels we inhabit.  Whatever level we choose, a personality on the next level up becomes the life guardian or  personal daimon. “Our guardian is the power immediately superior to the one we exercise, for it presides over our life without itself being active. By the kind of life that we prefer, we choose the guardian that presides over our life.” [Enneads iii.4, 1:236 in Guthrie trans] Plotinus also said that the guardian helps us to fulfill the destiny we have chosen before birth and “does not permit us to descend very far below the condition we have chosen.” [ iii.4=1:239] I find this both accurate and reassuring.

As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with that (slightly) higher self, and now progress to a relationship with a self on a yet higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey – on a continuing or even constant basis – our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

Take heart. I am with you always. I know you better than you know yourself. This was the opening of communication with an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.

    Now we are one but may still talk as two.

This was the essence of communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995. Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify and apply in ordinary reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers. What was coming through now was direct knowledge.

    Your mind on my purpose.

That was familiar language, the way this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self that was no stranger gave me some very clear information on the main theme of this chapter.

“When fusion takes place between a focus personality and the Higher Self (that is to say the control personality on the plane directly above the focus personality) the result is a step forward in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.

“This progression has taken humans from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects — to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane. Indeed, from this point of view you are attending the emergence of a new species.    

“Your physical equipment imposes limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of physiological change – in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of cells and naturally in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.

“Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher, clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise on the planes.”

This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years, I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer than your jugular vein.”

Higher Self, Greater Self. These are very big words. I want something smaller for the guide on a level above my present existence. There may be many levels to the Higher Self, ten that I know from, my own journeys, others beyond counting. The guide I check in with most frequently lives on a level just above me. I have come to think of him as my Double on the Balcony.

When I set out to meet him, I go to a terrace above the world. Sometimes it is the rooftop of a tall building, twenty stories up, or more. Often the terrace has the air of a civilized café, operating just for us. I find him seated at a table, perhaps with a glass of wine the color of moonlight. He is usually impeccably dressed, in a perfectly tailored white suit or a white dinner jacket. Occasionally I have the impression that he has a female companion; once she seemed to be an opera singer. But she is never part of our conversation.

He is impossibly beautiful. He looks like a man in the prime of life, maybe thirty years old, yet carrying the knowledge of millennia. He does not judge me. He is my witness. He knows all of my life. It is as open to him as the contents of a doll house when you remove the back and the roof. More than this, he remembers my other lives.

I should say, rather, our other lives. Something I have remembered, through our conversations, is that we have a twining relationship across time. When I am in the body, in a life on Earth, he is up here, on his balcony above the world. He still enjoys pleasures and creature comforts, but he is not enmeshed in the confusion and clutter of the physical world. He can sample delights that we associate with a physical body without being confined to one. The babalawo in me, the African diviner he calls my witchdoctor, says it has always been like this. While one of us is down in the marketplace of the world, the other observes as a “double in heaven”.

I like that phrase, but his is a near heaven, rather than a remote one. So how shall I describe him? I might call him my Witness Self, or my Free Self. He is not bound by the conditions of physical life. From his terrace, he can see the big picture. When I join him up there, I can see the crossroads and forking paths of my life from an aerial perspective.

He shows me some navigational challenges that lie ahead. There’s a spaghetti junction with whirling stands of traffic going off in all direction like an exploding bowl of pasta. It’s dizzying to look at. Inspecting this with his mildly humorous detachment, I see the scene lift to reveal a manageable locale, the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Now I can survey, one by one, the possible roads I can take from that place of decision. He reminds me that when life on the ground poses difficult choices — when I run into blockages or risk making a turn without reflecting on where that direction will take me — I should come up here, look at things from the higher perspective, and freeze the action while I observe myself traveling more than one of the possible roads in order to clarify and compare the probable outcomes.

From such encounters comes daily practice, one I can share with others. I picture myself in the thick of a situation where I am facing a choice or conflict or dilemma. I see myself pausing from acting or worrying, placing myself in a quiet mental space whatever is going on around me. I feel light coming down around me, until I am within a column or pillar of light. This brings the sense of blessing and protection. I sense benign energies and intelligence reaching down to me within the pillar of light. Then there is the sense of traction, of being carried up within the pillar. I could be carried up many levels, as if on an elevator. But it is sufficient, for everyday navigation, to go up just one level, to that terrace above the world.

Here I find again a Witness Self, a Free Self. From his table, I can see a relief map of my life, and of other lives and situations that will concern me. When the traffic patterns are hard to read, I can have everything slow down or stop so I can study it at my leisure.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Illustration: "Double on the Balcony" by Robert Moss

 

 

 

Encounters with a Greater Self

 Ultimately we make peace between the many aspects of our selves by rising to a conscious connection with the Self on a higher level, a Self that is no stranger. There are many ways of perceiving and receiving the knowledge and power of a Greater Self. In practical terms, your most important life teacher may be the aspect of the Greater Self whose home base is the level of consciousness and reality immediately above the one where you spend most of your time...

This was the wisdom of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. He taught that every human soul is a spectrum of possible levels of consciousness. Each of us is a cosmos, and we choose the level on which we live. Whatever level we choose, our spiritual guardian or daimon is on the level just above. Live well and evolve, and you may rise to a higher level with a daimon on a higher level again.

Plotinus offered one of the most rousing statements from the real philosophy of the ancient world: “The soul has the power to conform to her character the destiny allotted to her.” 

When I lay down for some horizontal meditation on the afternoon of October 14, 1993, I had mental contact with an intelligence that told me that “dreams are the primary dimension of being” and that the most important thing to teach people is that “Dreaming and waking are the same”.

 I felt within the larger presence – and its presence within me – throughout the day. I came to understand that he is with me, and has been with me, even in situations from which I have fancied that the Higher Self absents itself out of discretion or disgust. 

Your life partner, the soul pal who will never leave you, is your higher self, the soul of your soul, on the level where you can engage with each other. To open fully to this engagement requires a surrender of ego agendas and what don Miguel Ruiz calls the four agreements, self-limiting beliefs and accommodations that bind the soul. It may take desperate circumstances to bring this about, or a desperate state of mind. What follows the surrender is not a master-servant relationship but an active engagement, a blissful friendship in which you are never alone.

  I like to call my slightly higher self, Plotinus’ guardian, my Double on the Balcony. When I set out to meet him, I follow the road of dreams to a terrace above the world. Sometimes it is the rooftop of a tall building, twenty stories up, or more. Often the terrace has the air of a civilized café, operating just for us. I find him seated at a table, perhaps with a glass of wine the color of moonlight. He is usually impeccably dressed, in a perfectly tailored white suit or a dinner jacket. Occasionally I have the impression that he has a female companion; once she seemed to be an opera singer. But she is never part of our conversation.

He is impossibly beautiful. He looks like a man in the prime of life, maybe thirty years old, yet carrying the knowledge of millennia. He does not judge me. He is my witness. He knows all of my life. It is as open to him as the contents of a doll house when you remove the back and the roof. More than this, he remembers my other lives.

I should say, rather, our other lives. Something I have remembered, through our conversations, is that we have a twining relationship across time. When I am in the body, in a life on Earth, he is up here, on his balcony above the world. He still enjoys pleasures and creature comforts, but he is not enmeshed in the confusion and clutter of the physical world. He can sample delights that we associate with a physical body without being confined to one. The babalawo in me, the African diviner he calls my witchdoctor, says it has always been like this. While one of us is down in the marketplace of the world, the other observes as a “double in heaven”.

I like that phrase, but his is a near heaven, rather than a remote one. He is a Free Self. He is not bound by the conditions of physical life. From his terrace, he can see the big picture. When I join him up there, I can see the crossroads and forking paths of my life from an aerial perspective.

He shows me some navigational challenges that lie ahead. There’s a spaghetti junction with whirling stands of traffic going off in all direction like an exploding bowl of pasta. It’s dizzying to look at. Inspecting this with his mildly humorous detachment, I see the scene lift to reveal a manageable locale, the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Now I can survey, one by one, the possible roads I can take from that place of decision. He reminds me that when life on the ground poses difficult choices – when I run into blockages or risk making a turn without reflecting on where that direction will take me – I should come up here, look at things from the higher perspective, and freeze the action while I observe myself traveling more than one of the possible roads in order to clarify and compare the probable outcomes.

From such encounters comes daily practice, one I can share with others. I picture myself in the thick of a situation where I am facing a choice or conflict or dilemma. I see myself pausing from acting or worrying, placing myself in a quiet mental space whatever is going on around me. I feel light coming down around me, until I am within a column or pillar of light. This brings the sense of blessing and protection. I sense benign energies and intelligence reaching down to me within the pillar of light. Then there is the sense of traction, of being carried up within the pillar. I could be carried up many levels, as if on an elevator. But it is sufficient, for everyday navigation, to go up just one level, to that terrace above the world.

 Here I find again my Double on the Balcony. From his table, I can see a relief map of my life, and of other lives and situations that will concern me. When the traffic patterns are hard to read, I can have everything slow down or stop so I can study it at my leisure.

As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with that a slightly higher self and progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: "Kildare Window" by RM

The Double on the Balcony

Higher Self, Greater Self., Oversoul. Divine Double, religious scholar Charles Stang calls the Self above the regular self, the one that is not even partially confined to a physical body. These are very big words. I want something smaller and more colloquial for a personality I have come to know rather well. There may be many levels to the Higher Self, ten that I know, others beyond counting. He lives on a level just above the level I am on.

    When I set out to meet him, I follow the road of dreams to a terrace above the world. Sometimes it is the rooftop of a tall building, twenty stories up, or more. Often the terrace has the air of a civilized café, operating just for us. I find him seated at a table, perhaps with a glass of wine the color of moonlight. He is usually impeccably dressed, in a perfectly tailored white suit or a dinner jacket. Occasionally I have the impression that he has a female companion; once she seemed to be an opera singer. But she is never part of our conversation.
    He is impossibly beautiful. He looks like a man in the prime of life, maybe thirty years old, yet carrying the knowledge of millennia. He does not judge me. He is my witness. He knows all of my life. It is as open to him as the contents of a doll house when you remove the back and the roof. More than this, he remembers my other lives.
    I should say, rather, our other lives. Something I have remembered, through our conversations, is that we have a twining relationship across time. When I am in the body, in a life on Earth, he is up here, on his balcony above the world. He still enjoys pleasures and creature comforts, but he is not enmeshed in the confusion and clutter of the physical world. He can sample delights that we associate with a physical body without being confined to one. The babalawo in me, the African diviner he calls my witchdoctor, says it has always been like this. While one of us is down in the marketplace of the world, the other observes as a “double in heaven”.
     I like that phrase, but his is a near heaven, rather than a remote one. So how shall I describe him? I could call him my Free Self. He is not bound by the conditions of physical life.  I also think of him as my Double on the Balcony. From his terrace, he can see the big picture. When I join him up there, I can see the crossroads and forking paths of my life from an aerial perspective.
    He shows me some navigational challenges that lie ahead. There’s a spaghetti junction with whirling stands of traffic going off in all direction like an exploding bowl of pasta. It’s dizzying to look at. Inspecting this with his mildly humorous detachment, I see the scene lift to reveal a manageable locale, the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Now I can survey, one by one, the possible roads I can take from that place of decision. He reminds me that when life on the ground poses difficult choices – when I run into blockages or risk making a turn without reflecting on where that direction will take me – I should come up here, look at things from the higher perspective, and freeze the action while I observe myself traveling more than one of the possible roads in order to clarify and compare the probable outcomes.
    From such encounters comes daily practice, one I can share with others. I picture myself in the thick of a situation where I am facing a choice or conflict or dilemma. I see myself pausing from acting or worrying, placing myself in a quiet mental space whatever is going on around me. I feel light coming down around me, until I am within a column or pillar of light. This brings the sense of blessing and protection. I sense benign energies and intelligence reaching down to me within the pillar of light. Then there is the sense of traction, of being carried up within the pillar. I could be carried up many levels, as if on an elevator. But it is sufficient, for everyday navigation, to go up just one level, to that terrace above the world.
     Here I find again the Free Self. From his table, I can see a relief map of my life, and of other lives and situations that will concern me. When the traffic patterns are hard to read, I can have everything slow down or stop so I can study it at my leisure.
   

I wrote a poem in honor of my long relationship with my Free Self:

The Double on the Balcony

You are not my shadow.

You stand closer to the sun.

Of all my doubles, you are the most interesting.

You are watching when I forget you.

You are with me when I don’t notice.

You are not my judge, or my guardian angel.

You are the one who remembers.

You are my witness on the balcony above the world.

My friend the witchdoctor calls you

My “double in heaven”. You smile at this,

Reminding me the African lives are mine, not yours.

You saw all of it, from your balcony,

But did not drink the blood or savage joy.

It’s the other way round in other lives, you say:

From life to life, we change places.

When you come down to Earth

I take your seat on the terrace above.

We are together now, for a moment.

I’ve slipped out of the body

That neither confines nor delights you

To join you on your balcony above the world.

The wine in the cup is the color of moonlight.

Below us are all the roads of the world,

The casts and dramas of the many lives

Laid out in dioramas, as manageable from here

As toy soldier sets, or tea-party dolls.

You chide me gently (since humans are forgetful animals)

For forgetting you. I have been a serial amnesiac,

Losing bright nights when we roamed together,

And an ingrate – not seeing your hand in everyday miracles,

Not hearing your voice in the still sure moments of knowing,

Not feeling the breeze of your wing when you come,

In reluctant extremity, to restrain or release me.

When my road was blocked, you were the one

Who reminded me we can fly.

You love to travel in disguise

And I often missed you behind your masks.

When I mislaid my sense of humor

You burst in as a stand-up comic

And shocked me alive with belly-bawdy farce.

It’s easy for you to bring light, and lighten things up:

You stand closer to the sun.

RM journal drawing: "My Radiant Double as a Guide through Death". From a dream.

My poem "The Double on the Balcony"is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

Photo: "Big Sur balcony" by RM

You walk in many worlds

Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves — with all the baggage train of their separate lives — may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. Yet a sudden afflux of insight or forward-moving energy may be connected with joining up with an alternate and lively self, just as a sour mood of defeat or a series of otherwise inexplicable setbacks may relate to the shadow of a different parallel self, a Sad One or a Dark One.
   It is possible that every choice we make spins off a parallel event track with different outcomes. This is becoming the mainstream view of physics, as in Many Worlds theory. In this multidimensional universe, in our multidimensional self, we are connected to many counterpart personalities living in other times, other probable realities, other dimensions. According to the choices that we make and the dramas that we live, we sometimes come closer to them, and sometimes, in a sense, we step through a portal, we step through an opening between the worlds, we step through an interdimensional membrane, and our issues and our lives and our dramas and our gifts and our karma are joined.
   Then there is our relationship to other personalities, living in the past or future, whose dramas are connected to our own and may all be going on simultaneously. I think of a Mongolian warrior shaman who appeared in a recent dream, standing at a threshold. Behind him is a vast plain—a plain of battle, a plain of struggle. He is wearing a long, heavy coat of skins and furs. His headdress is a helmet with furs. He has bronze shaman’s mirrors and metal charms all over him. I look at this man in my dream, standing in the threshold between his reality and mine. I know that he is living at least eight centuries ago, yet we are connected now. We know each other. We are connected in a multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern.
    Such connections may be triggered by travel. You go to a new place, and you encounter the spirits of that land — including personalities that may be part of your own multidimensional story.
    Part of the secret logic of our lives is that we are all connected to counterpart personalities living in other times and other probable universes. Their gifts and challenges can become part of our current stories, not only through linear karma but through the interaction now across time and dimensions. The dramas of past, future or parallel personalities can affect us now. We can help or hinder each other.
     In the model of understanding I have developed, this family of counterpart souls is joined on a higher level by sort of hub personality, an “oversoul”, a higher self within a hierarchy of higher selves going up and up. The choices that you make, the moves that you make, can attract or repel other parts of your larger self.
    The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing of Mongol warrior shaman by Robert Moss

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self

Picture this: You are walking a spiraling path up a hill, past immense guardian figures, including a stone lion with a great carnelian in its back, flashing red fire. You enter a domed building that proves to be larger inside than outside. 

     Across the space you see an artist, working on an immense canvas that is set up against the opposite wall. At the bottom of the picture the artist has painted a human figure surrounded by bands of various colors, representing the body inside its multiple energy envelopes.
    This figure seems as small as a candle flame in proportion to the shapes above it, which represent the Higher Self, as encountered on successive levels. The finished area of the canvas is minute in comparison to the vast space of the canvas above, which goes up and up. It is impossible to see where it the picture in progress ends, if it ends.

I walked that spiral path, to the artist at work on a portrait of the Higher Self, in a dream.  It had terrific energy, plenty to share, and I felt that others might like to walk that path and meet their own version of the artist. In a workshop, I spread my dream over and around the group as a tent of vision within which we could visualize and explore successive levels of soul and Self.
      I invited the members of that circle to take the spiraling path, meet their own artist and inspect their own pictures of the Higher Self. While drumming for the group, I journeyed back inside my dream. I felt the great lion stirring, and the heat of the carnelian flashing fire. I reentered the domed building. I was surprised that it seemed to have acquired many windows that I did not recall from the original dream, in which the light streamed down from above, from a high skylight or a roof that was open to sun and moon. 
     When I looked more closely, I saw that the new windows were actually pictures that were being created by the artist selves of other dream travelers in our expedition. Some of these works glowed in translucent colors like stained glass.
     After I sounded the recall, and allowed a little time for people to make notes and sketches, I was eager to hear travel reports. One traveler reported that when she reached the stone lion, she mounted the carnelian on its back, like a saddle, and rode in this way through the entrance to the domed building. She found herself entering a triune state of consciousness: she entered the painting-in-progress, while at the same time merging with the artist and also maintaining a witness perspective that kept her alert to the activity of the other dreamers. 
    As the artist, she said, "I was painting on a swing hung from an unknown realm that swooped higher as I painted up. Abstract shapes in different colors brushed across the canvas and became pathways, river ways, forests that I could enter. Images from dreams, gods, goddesses, and infinite symbols exploded onto the panorama in full color, vibrant and alive. Inside the world I created my soul song. The experience was fast, expansive and filled with infinite joy."
    Another traveler reported: "The painter I encounter is at first a male Renaissance type but then the form disappears and it feels like me. I view a powerful, immense white light, looking something like a wide funnel or pillar, coming down from way high above where the ceiling should have been. Then it is as if I have become immense and the pillar of light is beaming through the top of my head permeating and surrounding me. 
     "There seems to be an entity invisible to me at the source of this light; it seems like a female entity. I am given to understand that this light-force holds the form of me in place, both as a "physical" image and energetically. Then I become aware that there are a number such as me attached to her and we are each living out possibilities that She dreams. They are as if attached by streams of light. They return into her when their lives are done."
     A third traveler reported: “I saw the smaller flame of the personality. Then I simply went into the painting. I found myself standing on one of the lines of a grid or net. The lines go up and down. I began to walk the grid. I realized that at the intersection of the lines there were other lines or pathways that went ‘in’. I could go up or down and then in. Those ‘in’ lines were paths along different timelines. I walked the times of Jeanne d'Arc. Another line took me to the times of Jesus of Nazareth. One pathway leads to the dawn of earth. There are so many lines and possibilities.
    "I saw people I do not know. The one I most want to know more about is not in the world we know. She turned toward me. She looked serene. She seemed to be a wise woman, a healer. She wears a beautiful garment, long and flowing. This robe or dress is lightweight, silky, a tapestry of blues and silvery colors, of a fabric unknown to earth. We communicate or make contact in a language I don't know when I'm back here. That contact felt more real than real. I think she can help me. I do not know if I can help her. She was not as surprised to see me as I was to see her."
     In my own journey, I was surprised that the painter looked like a figure from an earlier time, until part of my awareness fused with his. I studied the bands of color he had painted around the figure like a candle flame and was prompted by an inner voice to name the subtle energy bodies he had depicted in the manner of the Greek initiates: the sarkon pneumatikon, the sarkon astroeides, the sarkon augoeides. Above and beyond these, my artist had evoked a celestial body that has to be earned or re-acquired.
    High above, he had begun to depict a flaming sun-like disk. A shaft of light from this center reached down to the crown center of the figure at the bottom of the painting. Similar rays, or shafts of light, extended to other personalities embodied in different times and places. I understood that this represented a family of selves, joined by a common center - a self on a higher level - who have the same origin and whose fortunes are intimately connected even if they are never aware of each other in ordinary consciousness. They can have contact with each other through their subtle bodies, which are quite mobile, but the key to their deeper identity and life purpose is to be found at their common hub, which in turn is linked to a center on a yet higher level.      
    The reports other dream travelers brought back from this group journey, were no less extraordinary. Traveling with them, while drumming for the circle, I was privileged to see them creating their own portraits of the Higher Self. Our shared experience confirmed some of the central insights of Active Dreaming. A dream is a place. If you have been there once, you can go there again. You can invite others to come with you. When you travel into the dream worlds, you don't have to go alone. And you can learn to maintain consciousness in two or more realities simultaneously.


Photo of lion in the Louvre by Robert Moss

The Double on the Balcony

You are not my shadow.
You stand closer to the sun.
Of all my doubles, you are the most interesting.
You are watching when I forget you.
You are with me when I don’t notice.
You are not my judge, or my guardian angel.
You are the one who remembers.
You are my witness on the balcony above the world.

My friend the witchdoctor calls you
My “double in heaven”. You smile at this,
Reminding me the African lives are mine, not yours.
You saw all of it, from your balcony,
But did not drink the blood or savage joy.
It’s the other way round in other lives, you say:
From life to life, we change places.
When you come down to Earth
I take your seat on the terrace above.

We are together now, for a moment.
I’ve slipped out of the body
That neither confines nor delights you
To join you on your balcony above the world.
The wine in the cup is the color of moonlight.
Below us are all the roads of the world,
The casts and dramas of the many lives
Laid out in dioramas, as manageable from here
As toy soldier sets, or tea-party dolls.

You chide me gently (since humans are forgetful animals)
For forgetting you. I have been a serial amnesiac,
Losing bright nights when we roamed together,
And an ingrate – not seeing your hand in everyday miracles,
Not hearing your voice in the still sure moments of knowing,
Not feeling the breeze of your wing when you come,
In reluctant extremity, to restrain or release me.

When my road was blocked, you were the one
Who reminded me we can fly.
You love to travel in disguise
And I often missed you behind your masks.
When I mislaid my sense of humor
You burst in as a stand-up comic
And shocked me alive with belly-bawdy farce.
It’s easy for you to bring light, and lighten things up:
You stand closer to the sun.

This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming, published by Excelsior Editions.

Poems really shouldn't be explained. Robert Frost once said to someone who asked him to explain what one of his poems was about, "You want me to say it in worse English?" Nonetheless, I'll add two notes to the poem above because I am interested in encouraging conscious exploration of the many aspects and levels of the multidimensional self.
    The Yoruba of West Africa say that while we are living our lives in the "marketplace" of this world, we have a "double in heaven" who observes us from a higher level, and that we swap roles from life to life.
    In a big dream Wolfgang Pauli encountered a mysterious bright-and-dark stranger. Having been mentored for years by Jung on the categories of analytical psychology, the great physicist asked, "Are you my shadow?" To which the stranger responded, "You are my shadow. I stand between you and the sun." This episode is fully recounted in chapter 11 of  The Secret History of Dreaming.