Soul Sandwich

Last night, in my dream body, I went to a New York café for brunch and ordered The Alfred, a simple cheese sandwich on a garlic roll. The bread was incredibly delicious, a soft floury ciabatta. Deeply infused with garlic and olive oil, it still looked perfectly smooth and snow white. I separated the bread from the filling to savor every crumb.

The taste was in my mouth when I opened my eyes in bed. This was not an unusual experience for me. My taste buds often come alive in my dreams. I wonder whether this is related to different aspects of soul and the subtle body coming into play. The famous American psychic Edgar Cayce suggested that we need to discern whether a certain dream reflects the needs or wishes of the body, the mind or the spirit. Our dreams are often excursions, in which we travel beyond the physical body in a subtle vehicle, guided by whatever part of the self is in control.

Prior to sleep. my late night reading was the Book of Visions of the Kabbalist R. Hayyim Vital (1542-1620) , who writes at length about five levels of soul or consciousness (starting with nefesh, ruah, neshamah) and how they may follow separate trajectories between bodies and lives. He did not apply this closely to the 56 dream reports in his spiritual autobiography. However, the Persian mystic philosopher Shahabuddin Suhrawardi, whose followers called him Shaykh al-Ishraq, the Leader of Illumination, did.  He distinguished different levels of dreaming – with corresponding degrees of importance and reliability – according to which aspect of the self is the prime experiencer.

Clear dreams or “free revelation” [kashf] are experiences of soul [ruh] traveling beyond the body, or having clear communication with a visitor. The territory visited may be a separate reality or a situation in the future. “With the eye of the free soul, by the imagination, a person contemplates in dreams the state of things which is yet in the hidden.”

In this condition, the dreamer can have accurate foreknowledge of future events, and true clairvoyance. “After separation from the body, the soul knows even of the small things heard and seen of this world.” In clear dreams, the dreamer becomes a remote viewer.

This is a practice that can be developed in waking states of altered consciousness, or mukashafa. The Prophet Muhammad scouted out the progress of a caravan en route to Mecca in this way. The Caliph Umar, from afar, scouted an ambush that had been laid for his general Sariya (and sent his general a telepathic warning that was received).

The second of Suhrawardi's categories is symbolic dreams or “fancied revelations”. These he defines as dreams in which the lower self [nafs] is dominant. Clear vision is cloaked by the “fancy garments” of appetite and desire. Landscapes traveled in such dreams are “the stages of lust.” Interpretation is required to separate a message from the fancy dress.

Suhrawardi's lowest category is dreams of “pure fancy”. These unfold when “sensual thoughts” take over completely and higher consciousness [ruh] is “veiled from considering the hidden world.”

I'm pretty sure all levels of me love perfect bread - and garlic.

R. Hayyim Vital's Book of Visions  is available in Jewish Mystical Autobiographies, trans. Maurice M. Faierstein, ed. Isaac Safrin (Mahwah N.J.: Paulist Press, 1999)

Translations of Suhrawardi are from H. Wilberforce (ed. and trans.) A Dervish Textbook ('Awariful-Ma'arif) (London: Octagon Press, 1990). For more on Suhrawardi, see my book The Secret History of Dreaming.

Tapped by the Hoopoe

 

At my workshop at the Hameau de l'Etoile in April, 2016 , a hoopoe tapped five times on the window behind my head. We don’t see hoopoes where I live, in North America, but I know the bird well from mythology.The hoopoe, with its crown of feathers, is a royal and magical bird in its normal plumage, with a grand role in the folklore and sacred stories of the East. Hoopoes were messengers between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In The Conference of the Birds, a great Persian tale of mystical ascent by the poet Farid ud-din Attar, it is the hoopoe that calls the birds together to embark on the quest for the King. In the quest, the birds who survive the journey fuse together as the Simurgh, the bird of heaven. In our meeting room in southern France, I knew I was fluttering on the mythic edge.

My workshop was titled Becoming a Kairomancer. I invented the word “kairomancer” to describe a master of special moments, an everyday magician forever poised to recognize special Kairos moments of synchronicity and celebrate than and act on the opportunities they present. In such moments, we sometimes feel that powers from a deeper reality are tapping on the windows of our ordinary perception to encourage us to open to a larger life and the play of forces beyond our consensual hallucinations. I felt this as the hoopoe tapped, and tapped again and again, as I told the group about its role in bringing the birds together to make the heaven bird.

Chansons, I concluded my tale. Let's sing.

Flights of the Simurgh

There are mythic beings that roost in the mind, ready to seize your imagination and carry you off on wild adventures: dragons, griffins and other fantastic beasts. Some may stay with you for a whole lifetime, and may remind you of other lifetimes. I can’t remember when I first heard the name of the  Simurgh, but I know I have heard its cry and felt the wind of its wings long before naming.  

Jorge Luis Borges was also fascinated by the mystical bird of Persian mythology. He wrote an essay reflecting on the mystery of how, in The Conference of the Birds, thirty birds become one bird, while the one bird is still thirty. He quotes these astonishing lines by his fellow-Argentine poet, Silvina Ocampo: 

Era Dios ese pájaro como un enorme espejo:
los contenía a todos; no era un mero reflejo.
En sus plumas hallaron cada uno sus plumas
en los ojos, los ojos con memorias de plumas  

This bird was God, like an enormous mirror
that contained them all, and not a mere reflection.
In his feathers each one found his own feathers,
in his eyes, their eyes with the memories of feathers.[1]

When I found this, my memories stirred of one of the big dreams of my life. In the dream, back in 1988, I found myself in a house on a canal, perhaps in Amsterdam. The house belonged to a magician. I sampled the rich library. On a large table in another room, under glass, I found an elaborate machine signed by Israel Regardie, who disclosed the secret rituals and "flying rolls" of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, I found a Persian rug, lying on the bed. Still rolled and tied with strings, it seemed to have been recently delivered, and still unused, at least in this house. While I contemplated the rug, a shamanic teacher with whom I had studied entered the room behind me. He was immensely excited by the rug, wanting to know when it had been delivered and when and how I planned to use it.

I woke excited, with many questions. The first was: who is the owner of this house? Instead of speculating on this theme, I reentered the dream, with the aid of shamanic drumming, to make a full tour. I discovered what you might have guessed, had you heard my initial report. The house on the canal was my own, a place where I could explore my connections with many traditions of inner work and practical magic with which I appear to have connections across space and time. I went carefully through several volumes in the library. I examined the Golden Dawn machine. It was antiquated, with unnecessary Heath Robinson features, but still in fine working order.

Then I went up the stairs to the bedroom and unrolled the Persian rug. I marveled at the beauty of the design. It was woven in colors of blue and silver. At the center was the form of a great bird I knew to be the Simurgh. When I spread out the rug, the Simurgh rose and spread its great wings. I found myself instantly on its back. We made a wild ride across space and time. I was drawn into the world and the visions of the Magi, and saw Bethlehem as they visioned it. I found myself chanting ancient names in Farsi. My mind opened to memories of the Fravarti, the Choosers, spiritual knights of Persian tradition who make the choice to leave a higher world to come into this one to fight a good fight. 

 Over the years that followed my discovery of the Persian rug in the house on the canal, I received visitations in the twilight zone between sleep and awake that prompted me to deepen my study of Persian mystical traditions. A name that was mentioned again and again was that of Suhrawardi, the great medieval mystical philosopher. On a night that opened like a flower, I felt a radiant presence in my room.

 Rise from your body, and I will descend to you. 

I loosened physical focus without separating from the body. I had the impression of a handsome young man of Persian appearance, wearing modern clothes, a suit and a shirt with banded collar. He said that his name was Shams. He told me, “Suhrawardi is the key to your understanding of the dream cosmos,” and that I should use his geographies of the Imaginal Realm. “Go to Mount Qaf.” 

I read translations of Suhrawardi’s works, and books about him by the French scholar Henry Corbin. I read about a mystical journey through the realm of the moon to a tree bearing all fruits on a high peak of the world mountain, Mount Qaf. In that tree is the nest of the Simurgh. 

I stretched out on my bed, in an early dawn, and was transported into this scene: 

I am in a palace that is open to the winds, a place of soaring arches. It does not seem to stand on earth, but among the stars. It is roofless, open to the night sky, which is dark yet light at the same time, shimmering in every particle. There are twelve spacious rooms in the palace. Each contains marvelous musical instruments, shaped like butterfly wings. Some have multiple wings or leaves. They resembled stringed harps, yet the “strings” are so fine as to be invisible. Cosmic winds blow celestial harmonies through these wings of sound. I marvel at the beauty of these harmonies.[2]

In one of Suhrawardi’s visionary treatises, I found the Simurgh with its wind and music: 

“This Simurgh flies without moving, and he soars without wings. He approaches without traversing space. All colors are from him, but he himself has no color. His nest is in the orient, but the occident is not void of him. All are occupied with him, but he is free of all. All are full of him, but he is empty of all, All knowledge emanates and is derived from his shrill cry, and marvelous instruments such as the organ have been made from his thrilling voice….His food is fire, and whoever finds one of his feathers to his right side and passes through the fire will be safe from burning. The zephyr is from his breath, hence lovers speak their hearts’ secrets and innermost thoughts with him.” [3]  

 I went on a quest to find an image of the Simurgh as it appeared on the magic carpet in my dream of the house on the canal. I found many pictures over the years, but failed to find the silver and blue heaven bird that took flight in my dream.

 I have Peter Sis' beautiful illustrated and simplified version of The Conference of the Birds. There is a lovely picture of thirty birds joined in the form of a giant bird in full flight, but not the colors from my dream. [3] 

I mounted yet another online search and hit gold, or rather, silver. The mosaic in the photograph shows the Simurgh in the colors of my dream. The mosaic is on the wall of Nadir Divan-Beghi madrassah, Bukhara, Uzbekistan

As I was writing this blog, the hoopoe tapped me again, in the pages of a novel I picked up for now particular reason except that I like the word oracle and was teaching Istanbul in that period. In Michael David Lukas’s novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, the very young protagonist (a child savant from Constanta, Romania) is accompanied everywhere by a flock of hoopoe birds distinguished by their unusual color. They are light purple rather than brown. I learned that hoopoes are are renowned in Turkey today for the ability to see the unseen, for example, to locate underground sources of water. Hard to miss messages when storied birds come so gorgeously arrayed, literally tapping at the window or circling around your head.  In The Oracle of Stamboul, the hoopoes help to give a little girl the ear of a Sultan, no less.

When synchronicity strikes, the universe becomes personal and we may sense a hidden hand, reaching through the veils of ordinary perception to tickle or tap us awake. For me, this sequence, playing in dreams of the night and dreams of the day over decades, is confirmation that we are called beyond our current identities to traditions and lineages that may be part of our larger, multidimensional story.  

References 

1.  "The Simurgh and the Eagle" by Jorge Luis Borges is one of his "Nine Dantesque Essays" reprinted in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 2000). The Silvina Ocampo poem is Espacios métricos, 12.

2.  For more on own adventures in these realms, please see The Boy Who Died and Came Back chapter 38, "Flights of the Simurgh"

3.  Peter Sis, The Conference of the Birds (New York: Penguin Books, 2013)

4.  Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, “The Shrill Cry of the Simurgh” in W.M.Thackson, Jr. (trans) The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi (London: Octagon Press, 1982) p.88

 

Welcome to the Imaginal Realm

 

There is a world between time and eternity with structures created by thought that outlast anything on Earth. This is the Imaginal Realm. You may enter it through the gate of dreams, or the gate of death, or on nights when you drop your body like a bathrobe. Here you will find schools and palaces, places of adventure, healing and initiation.

    The Imaginal Realm is a fundamental ground of knowledge and experience. It is a region of mind between the world of time and the world of eternity. In this realm human imagination meets intelligences from higher realities, and they co-construct places of healing, instruction and initiation. Here ideas and powers beyond the grasp of the ordinary human mind – call them archetypes, tutelary spirits, gods or daimons – take on guises humans can begin to perceive and understand.

   The great medieval Sufi philosopher Suhrawardi insisted both on the objective reality of the Imaginal Realm and that the way to grasp it is the way of experience: “pilgrims of the spirit succeed in contemplating this world and they find there every object of their desire.”  To know the realm of true imagination, you must go there yourself.  Happily for you – once you wake up to what is going on – the doors may open to you any night in dreams, or in the fertile place between sleep and awake, or in a special moment of synchronicity when the universe gets personal and you know, through your shivers, that greater powers are in play.

    In dreams, we awaken to other orders of reality. When we wake up in our regular bodies, we may have fallen asleep in another world. Sometimes, lying in the drifty state near sleep, I sense that as I grow drowsy, a second self, back to back with me on the bed, is stirring awake, ready to prowl. I call him the Traveler.   

    I track the Traveler by recording his exploits – the ones I manage to catch – in my journal. In one report he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different event track, or in another body in another time or another world..

    The traveler’s tales in my book Mysterious Realities are "just-so" stories in the sense that they spring from direct experience in the Imaginal Realm, my own and that of other dream travelers who have shared their adventures with me. This territory is more familiar to you than you may currently realize. You are a traveler in your dreams, whether or not you remember them.

    You visit realms where the dead are alive. You travel into the possible future, scouting the roads that lie ahead. You travel into the past, into scenes from your present life, and other lives that are part of your story. You go to studio sets, where dream movies are made by production crews behind the scenes, to arouse and entertain, or to shock dreamers awake. You slip into parallel lives, where your parallel selves are moving on different event tracks because they made different choices.

    What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set.
     It gets more interesting. When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream.
    When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you.

In Mysterious Realities, you’ll confirm that the doors to the Imaginal Realm open from wherever you are. You’ll see what it means to live on a mythic edge. At any moment, you may fall, like the author, into the lap of a goddess or the jaws of an archetype. Are you ready? A survival tip: don’t go to any world without your sense of humor.

 

Magic carpet collage by Michele Ferro
      

Ten Books That Gave Roadside Assistance on My Soul Journey

 

Books have been faithful and essential friends all my life. I had a difficult and lonely boyhood, an only child who suffered double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven. Books were my portals to realms of imagination and wonder as I lay in the half light of sick rooms. I thrived on good historical novels and on scifi and fantasy.

I like to own paper copies of all the books I read so I can sniff them and caress them and interact with a pencil. I live with an extended book family of around 14,000 volumes. My best finds are often mediated by dreams and by lively shelf elves of the kind that make books materialize and dematerialize in magical ways. My cat Lucy has recently asserted herself as a shelf elf or more - a supervising librarian- on four paws 

Like my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, I sometimes picture paradise as an Infinite library. Like another of my favorite writers, Mircea Eliade, I also know that the most important book I will ever write - and one of the most important I will ever read - is my own journal. Recording dreams, observations and reading reports in my journal is essential daily practice for me.

I was recently invited to identify ten books that have provided guidance and inspiration in my spiritual odyssey and share what was happening in my life when they came to me. My journal was there to remind me what restored my inner compass and put gas in my tank in the critical passages.

 

1

The Odyssey 

Since I was boy, the Odyssey has been my favorite vision of life as a mythic journey. Beyond the thrill of sea monsters and angry gods and one-eyed monsters, the tale of Odysseus, the “man of many ways” is the story of a wounded warrior who is healed in the realm of the Divine Feminine. This is why Robert Graves thought it was created by a woman, and I believe he is right. In the Odyssey we see what it means to travel consciously in the presence of a guiding spirit, in this case the goddess Athena. We see that dreams are a field of interaction between gods and humans and transit lounge between the Otherworld and the physical world. Has it been made clearer anywhere else that the hardest part of the heroic quest is the homecoming? A large part of the epic is devoted to the struggles of the returning traveler to find their feet on home ground. I have used many translations over the years, not least for occasional bibliomancy; my favorite now is the most recent; the clean, spare poetic version by Emily Wilson.

 

2

W.B.Yeats, Collected Poems 

I knew many of Yeats’ poems by heart before I was presented with my first copy of his collected poems at my graduation from Canberra Grammar School as a prize for writing verse.  In his “Song of Wandering Aengus” I thrilled to the bardic voice of one who lived close to the Otherworld, who knew the secrets of shapeshifting and understood soul loss and soul recoveryI learned much more from Yeats’ other writings, especially Mythologies and A Vision and from walking in his footsteps in Ireland, where it is easy to understand his statement that “the visible is the skin of the invisible”. He appeared to me during a shamanic journey, saying “What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?” and I was enchanted to let him play that role in my inner life as I wrote The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. I learned the truth of his conviction that kindred spirits reach to each other across time and may generate a “mingling of minds”. I shared his experience of a creative daimon that is forever driving us to attempt the things that are most difficult, short of the impossible.

 

3

Dion Fortune, Secrets of Dr Taverner 

She was a true priestess of the Wester Way. I came to her first through her important book Psychic Self-Defence, which is not for the faint-hearted. I proceeded to read, over the years, everything that I could find by her. I was excited to discover that she regarded her fiction as her most important writing on the practice of real magic A character in her novel The Goat-Foot God says that "writers will put things into a novel that they daren't put in sober prose." Dion Fortune herself said "the novels give the practice." While I love The Sea Priestess and her other novels, it is the stories collected in The Secrets of Dr Taverner that I return to again and again. The central character is a soul doctor in tweeds who deals with such complains as reincarnational dramas, astral repercussion, psychic attack, soul theft and energy vampirism. The Taverner stories are both entertaining and a valuable source of practical guidance on psychic protection and spiritual cleansing. In its fictional wrapping, The Secrets of Dr Taverner is a practitioner's casebook and perhaps the most accessible of all Dion Fortune's works for the contemporary reader.

 

4

Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents *

When I moved in the 1980s to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk country in upstate New York, because of a hawk and a white oak, I started dreaming in a language I did not know, which proved to be an archaic version of the Mohawk language. The speaker was an ancient arendiwanen, or “woman of power”. Our encounters recalled me to ancient ways of dreaming and healing and gave me immense research assignments. In the way of synchronicity, a used book dealer turned up at my door with all 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations in the back of his truck. These are the reports of blackrobe missionaries from Indian country in the 17^th century. Read carefully, drawing aside the veils of religious prejudice and fear, we have here an extraordinary source on the spiritual practices of Native Americans in Northeast America at the time of first contact. The Iroquois taught their children that dreams are the single most important source of both practical and spiritual guidance. They believed that dreams show us “the secret wishes of the soul.” In a time of war and imported disease, they recognized dreaming as a key survival tool and sent their dream shamans to scout the future. You’ll find the essential things I learned from the Jesuit reports -and the direct teachings of the Mother of the Wolf Clan who led me to use them – in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the SecretWishes of the Soul.

 

5

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 

I discovered Jung in high school and devoured many volumes of his Collected Works when I was an undergraduate. In the midst of my own psychic storms in 1987–1988, I turned to Jung again, to see how he made sense of his own “confrontation with the unconscious.” My main source was Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his life story as recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. We did not yet have the Red Book, and the memoir is in any event a more accessible account of what was essentially the Underworld ordeal and initiation of a shaman-scholar of the West. Central to Jung’s ability to restore his inner compass was his daily recording of dreams. “Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed” is one of the most helpful statements that has ever been made about dreams and dreamwork, and confirmation for me of the method I was obliged to improvise in my own time of testing. He confirmed for me that engaging with images in your inner life – including the terrifying ones – is a path to healing and self-empowerment. I felt the deep truth of his ringing assertion that “anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.” I write about Jung as “The Dream Shaman of Switzerland” in my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

 

6

Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks 

When I was going through a crisis of spiritual emergence at midlife, a friend prevailed on me to read Seth Speaks, a book channeled by Jane Roberts from an intelligence who describes himself as “ an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter”. Previously somewhat resistant to channeled material, I found myself gifted with the clearest model of multidimensional reality and the multidimensional self that I had encountered. The book was a life ring for me in my efforts to understand and navigate “past life” and parallel life connections. Seth confirmed for me that we may live many existences at one time. We are connected to personalities living in the past and the future and in parallel realities, ane it is all happening Now.  Reincarnation is for real, but only one of many after-death options, and we mustn't get trapped in linear conceptions of karma and in past-life "passion plays" because any past or future is a probable reality that can be accessed and changed Now.

 

7

Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh 

Winged Pharaoh thrilled me with its vivid depiction of the practices of a dream school in ancient Egypt operating in the precinct of Anubis. Joan Grant published it as a novel, but revealed later that it is actually a book of “far memory” of a life in early dynastic Egypt. We follow Grant’s alter ego, Sekeeta, as she learns to go scouting in dreams to find lost objects, look into the future, observe things happening at a distance, and discover what is going on behind the scenes. As a child, she sleeps with a wax tablet beside her bed, and her first task each morning is to record her dreams. She takes her reports to the priest of Anubis, her dream teacher. Some days she must carry out assignments he gave her inside a dream – for example to bring him a certain flower, or bird feather, or colored bead. She learns to travel in dreaming beyond time and space, to scout the possible future, and to communicate with the deceased. She encounters people who have died and are confused about their condition and moves into the role of psychopomp. In the language of ancient Egypt, a dream (rswt) is literally an “awakening”. Winged Pharaoh reawakened me to what it means to dream like an Egyptian and I have used it as a handbook in guiding others.  

 

8

Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism 

A lifelong student of the medieval Sufi philosophers, French scholar Henry Corbin brought the term Imaginal Realm into currency in the West. In Arabic, the term is Alam al-Mithal and it refers to the realm of true imagination, an order of reality that is at least as real as the physical world, with cities and schools and palaces where human travelers can interact with master teachers. Corbin’s great work Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a marvelous essay in visionary spirituality that embodies his driving purpose of helping to free the religious imagination from all types of fundamentalism. Corbin regarded study as a quest. In The Voyage and the Messenger looking back on his scholarly journey, he wrote that “to be a philosopher is to take to the road, never settling down in some place of satisfaction with a theory of the world…The adventure is…a voyage which progresses towards the Light". His books were with me, to anchor and orient, through the incandescent nights when I found myself in dialogue with Persian philosopher mystics and riding with the heaven bird of Persian mythology, the Simurgh. The Man of Light is Corbin’s most accessible work and one to which I return again and again. The subtitle of my book Mysterious Realities is Tales of a Dream Traveler from the Imaginal Realm.

9

W.T. Stead, The Blue Island 

I love the Victorian ghost hunters, especially F.W.H. Myers, W.T. Stead and William James. They were passionately dedicated to producing evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death that would meet the scientific standards of their day. They promised that after their deaths they would continue their work by trying to communicate in exact detail from the Other Side. Among all the channeled books that resulted, my favorite is The Blue Island,in which Stead (who went down with the Titanic) recounts his early after death experiences to male mediums sitting in the presence of his daughter. As a former journalist, Stead is especially interested in how news is transmitted in the transition zone where he finds himself. He describes a communications center, “an amazingly well organized and businesslike place” constantly filled with ex-physicals. “Those who had on earth believed and those who had not, came to try and wire a message home.” The ones who feel a “heart call” always get priority. They have a system of “travelers”, who can reach receptive minds on Earth. Stead describes how the living can reach to the departed in a similar way. You concentrate on an individual in the spirit world, and if you put enough energy into that thought, the individual you have in mind will feel you and you may be able to open a communications channel. This beautiful little book is one of the essential Western books of the dead.

 

10

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning 

I reread this extraordinary book every few years. A successful Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna, Viktor Frankl was carried off to Auschwitz and reduced to a walking skeleton with a tattoo on his arm. In one of the darkest nightmares of history, he applied his imagination. He grew an impossible dream: of a scene in the future when the Nazis were a memory and he was standing in front of a well-fed audience in a good suit giving a lecture on “The psychology of the Concentration Camps”. In his vision the Nazi evil was so thoroughly destroyed – and he so thoroughly restored – that he could lecture about it from an objective perspective. Frankl not only survived the Holocaust. His dream played out a year after the war, in every detail. I have derived three life-orienting lessons from this. First, that however tough our situation may seem to be, we always have the freedom to choose our attitude, and this can change everything. Second, that our problems, however bad, are unlikely to be quite as bad as the situation of someone who has been sent to a Nazi death camp. That thought may help us to gain perspective, and to stand back from a welter of grief and self-pity and rise to a place where we can start to dream up something better.Third, we can make inner movies, and if they are good enough it is possible that they will play in the theater of the world.

 I look over this list and wonder why it does not include so many other books and authors that have affected me deeply: Albert Camus, Rilke, Herman Hesse, the Upanishads, Dostoyevsky, Christopher Brennan, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Hilda Ellis Davidson, Ursula Le Guin, Mary Oliver, AE (George Russell), the (for me) inescapable Borges and Eliade. Again, my journal shaped my selections, reminding me how certain books converged with critical passages of spiritual emergence in my life, when I needed confirmation even more than inspiration.

*I'm not expecting anyone to read the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations that are on my shelves although today you can no doubt find them onlne. I was looking over the books that gave me anchors and life rings in decisive passages in my journey.In this case, I needed confirmation of what I was learning from the Mother of the Wolf Clan I call "Island Woman"in my books. In another book that was very important to me, The Journal of Major John Norton, a half-Cherokee British officer in the war of 1812, I confirmed the historical identity of Island Woman as the grandmother of Molly and Joseph Brant, born Huron (Wendat) and adopted into the Mohawk natoion after she was captured by a Mohawk raiding party aged about five.

 

Colors of the Simurgh

There are mythic beings that roost in the mind, ready to seize your imagination and carry you off on wild adventures: dragons, griffins and other fantastic beasts. Some may stay with you for a whole lifetime, and may remind you of other lifetimes. I can’t remember when I first heard the Persian name of the heaven bird known as the Simurgh, but I know I have heard its cry and felt the wind of its wings long before naming.  

Jorge Luis Borges was also fascinated by the mystical bird of Persian mythology. He wrote an essay reflecting on the mystery of how, in The Conference of the Birds, thirty birds become one bird, while the one bird is still thirty. He quotes these astonishing lines by his fellow-Argentine poet, Silvina Ocampo: 

Era Dios ese pájaro como un enorme espejo:
los contenía a todos; no era un mero reflejo.
En sus plumas hallaron cada uno sus plumas
en los ojos, los ojos con memorias de plumas  

This bird was God, like an enormous mirror
that contained them all, and not a mere reflection.
In his feathers each one found his own feathers,
in his eyes, their eyes with the memories of feathers.[1]

When I found this, my memories stirred of one of the big dreams of my life. In the dream, half a lifetime ago, I found myself in a house on a canal, perhaps in Amsterdam. The house belonged to a magician. I sampled the rich library. On a large table in another room, under glass, I found an elaborate machine signed by Israel Regardie, who disclosed the secret rituals and "flying rolls" of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, I found a Persian rug, lying on the bed. Still rolled and tied with strings, it seemed to have been recently delivered, and still unused, at least in this house. While I contemplated the rug, a shamanic teacher with whom I had studied entered the room behind me. He was immensely excited by the rug, wanting to know when it had been delivered and when and how I planned to use it.

I woke excited, with many questions. The first was: who is the owner of this house? Instead of speculating on this theme, I reentered the dream, with the aid of shamanic drumming, to make a full tour. I discovered what you might have guessed, had you heard my initial report. The house on the canal was my own, a place where I could explore my connections with many traditions of inner work and practical magic with which I appear to have connections across space and time. I went carefully through several volumes in the library. I examined the Golden Dawn machine. It was antiquated, with unnecessary Heath Robinson features, but still in fine working order.

Then I went up the stairs to the bedroom and unrolled the Persian rug. I marveled at the beauty of the design. It was woven in colors of blue and silver. At the center was the form of a great bird I knew to be the Simurgh. When I spread out the rug, the Simurgh rose and spread its great wings. I found myself instantly on its back. We made a wild ride across space and time. I was drawn into the world and the visions of the Magi, and saw Bethlehem as they visioned it. I found myself chanting ancient names in Farsi. My mind opened to memories of the Fravarti, the Choosers, spiritual knights of Persian tradition who make the choice to leave a higher world to come into this one to fight a good fight. 

 Over the years that followed my discovery of the Persian rug in the house on the canal, I received visitations in the twilight zone between sleep and awake that prompted me to deepen my study of Persian mystical traditions. A name that was mentioned again and again was that of Suhrawardi, the great medieval mystical philosopher. On a night that opened like a flower, I felt a radiant presence in my room.

 Rise from your body, and I will descend to you. 

I loosened physical focus without separating from the body. I had the impression of a handsome young man of Persian appearance, wearing modern clothes, a suit and a shirt with banded collar. He said that his name was Shams. He told me, “Suhrawardi is the key to your understanding of the dream cosmos,” and that I should use his geographies of the Imaginal Realm. “Go to Mount Qaf.” 

I read translations of Suhrawardi’s works, and books about him by the French scholar Henry Corbin. I read about a mystical journey through the realm of the moon to a tree bearing all fruits on a high peak of the world mountain, Mount Qaf. In that tree is the nest of the Simurgh. 

I stretched out on my bed, in an early dawn, and was transported into this scene: 

I am in a palace that is open to the winds, a place of soaring arches. It does not seem to stand on earth, but among the stars. It is roofless, open to the night sky, which is dark yet light at the same time, shimmering in every particle. There are twelve spacious rooms in the palace. Each contains marvelous musical instruments, shaped like butterfly wings. Some have multiple wings or leaves. They resembled stringed harps, yet the “strings” are so fine as to be invisible. Cosmic winds blow celestial harmonies through these wings of sound. I marvel at the beauty of these harmonies.[2]

In one of Suhrawardi’s visionary treatises, I found the Simurgh with its wind and music: 

“This Simurgh flies without moving, and he soars without wings. He approaches without traversing space. All colors are from him, but he himself has no color. His nest is in the orient, but the occident is not void of him. All are occupied with him, but he is free of all. All are full of him, but he is empty of all, All knowledge emanates and is derived from his shrill cry, and marvelous instruments such as the organ have been made from his thrilling voice….His food is fire, and whoever finds one of his feathers to his right side and passes through the fire will be safe from burning. The zephyr is from his breath, hence lovers speak their hearts’ secrets and innermost thoughts with him.” [3] 

 I went on a quest to find an image of the Simurgh as it appeared on the magic carpet in my dream of the house on the canal. I found many pictures over the years, but failed to find the silver and blue heaven bird that took flight in my dream.

 I have Peter Sis' beautiful illustrated and simplified version of The Conference of the Birds, the long Sufi poem by Farid ud-din Attar that is our main source on the Simurgh and the mystery of the many who are one and the one who is many. There is a lovely picture of thirty birds joined in the form of a giant bird in full flight, but not the colors from my dream. [3] 

I mounted yet another online search and hit gold, or rather, silver. The mosaic in the photograph, from Bukhara, shows the Simurgh in the colors of my dream. 

For me, this sequence is important confirmation that we are called in dreams and dreamlike states to traditions and lineages that may be part of our larger, multidimensional story.  

References 

1.      "The Simurgh and the Eagle" by Jorge Luis Borges is one of his "Nine Dantesque Essays" reprinted in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 2000). The Silvina Ocampo poem is Espacios métricos, 12.

2.      For more on own adventures in these realms, please see The Boy Who Died and Came Back chapter 38, "Flights of the Simurgh"

3.      Peter Sis, The Conference of the Birds (New York: Penguin Books, 2013)

4.      Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, “The Shrill Cry of the Simurgh” in W.M.Thackson, Jr. (trans) The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi (London: Octagon Press, 1982) p.88

 

Top picture: Simurgh in a mosaic on the wall of Nadir Divan-Beghi madrassah, Bukhara, Uzbekistan

 

 

What part of you is the dreamer?

Edgar Cayce suggested distinguishing dreams that reflect the needs or wishes of the body, the mind and the spirit. 

     The great medieval Persian mystic Shahabuddin Suhrawardi was one of those who knew about this through direct experience.  From his visionary journeys in the alam al-mithal, or Imaginal Realm, he brought us geographies of many cities invisible to ordinary eyes and to dreamers operating only from lower centers of the self. Suhrawardi wrote, for example, of an "earth of visions" named Hurqalya. It is an interworld, located between the sensory world and an angelic realm beyond terrestrial forms.
     Hurqalya is roofed with shining convexities, plane within plane, like crystals that interpenetrate and turn into each other. It contains the Hall of the Masters, where beings who transcend human geometries consent to project themselves into shimmering stability of form to communicate with those who succeed in ascending to their level.
     Dreaming will get you on your way to such places of initiation, rapture and transformation. But you need to start by paying attention to who is at the controls when you embark on your dream flights.
     Suhrawardi  distinguished three distinct levels of dreaming. The importance and reliability of what is experienced in dreaming depends on what part of you gets you there..

    In clear dreams or “free revelation” [kashf] your soul [ruh] goes traveling beyond the body, or you receive a visitation. Your soul travels make take you to other realities, or into the future, “With the eye of the free soul, by the imagination, a person contemplates in dreams the state of things which is yet in the hidden.” In this condition, the dreamer can have accurate foreknowledge of future events, and true clairvoyance.
    “After separation from the body, the soul knows even of the small things heard and seen of this world.” In clear dreams, the dreamer becomes a time traveler or remote viewer. This is a practice that can be developed in waking states of altered consciousness, or mukashafa. Suhrawardi calls in evidence episodes from the early history of Islam to support this discussion. Thus the Prophet scouted out the progress of a caravan en route to Mecca through mukashafa. The Caliph Umar, from afar, scouted an ambush that had been laid for his general Sariya and sent his general a telepathic warning that was received.

      Suhrawardi's second category of dreams includes "symbolic dreams" and “fancied revelations” . Now its is the lower self, nafs, rather than the soul, ruh, that is in charge of what is seen and experienced. vision is cloaked by the “fancy garments” of appetite and desire. Landscapes traveled in such dreams are “the stages of lust.” Interpretation is required to separate a message from the fancy dress.

     The third and lowest category of dream experience in Suhrawardi's hierarchy is "pure fancy”. You have fallen so deep into appetency that “sensual thoughts” rule your dream body and you have zero chance of getting out of the slums and fleshpots of the lower astral. You are “veiled from considering the hidden world.”

Suhrawardi's master work was his immense Philosophy of Illumination. It's a difficult read in translation (I have tried both English and French versions) and is still most accessible through the books of Henry Corbin, the great French scholar of mystical Islam. Suhrawardi is known as Shaikh al-Ishraq, the Master of Illumination. He melded ancient Persian, Hermetic and Platonic traditions together with mystical Islam and encouraged his students to follow a path of direct experience of the sacred. He is also known as Shaikh al-Maqtul "the Murdered Master", because in 1191 he was executed on charges of heresy by the judicial killers of Sharia Islam, who feared this wise and peaceful man over the youthful heir to the Caliphate.

Source: I have based this simplified account on Suhrawardi's teachings about dreams on a useful early translation of some of his writings: H. Wilberforce Clarke (trans) Shahabuddin Suhrawardi, A Dervish Textbook ('Awariful-Ma'arif).

Image: The Mi'rāj (ascent of the Prophet) ascribed to Sultan Muhammad, c.1540. Watercolor and ink. In British Library.

Riding Winged Books to the Imaginal Realm

"Robert, this is direct knowledge. Suhrawardi is the key to your understanding of the dream cosmos. Use his geographies - of Hurqalya, Jabarsa and Jabalqa.
    "Hurqalya: roofed with shining convexities, plane within plane, like crystals that interpenetrate and turn into each other. It contains the Hall of the Masters, where they project themselves into shimmering stability of form."

I rose from the liminal state between sleep and waking to record these lines in my journal, on March 13, 1998. Though the words are very foreign in English, I recognized them as locations in the Imaginal Realm, as described by the medieval Persian Sufi philosopher Suhrawardi, whose work was known to me primarily through that of Henry Corbin. 
    I did not feel the need to identify the exact source of the communication. My feelings told me it came from a source I could trust. It drove me to deepen my researches.*
    Four months later, after reading deep into the night in the pages of Henry Corbin's works on the Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi, I lay in bed after 4:00 am and felt I was floating between the worlds. I had strong impressions of fabric patterns, predominantly rust-reds, mauves and yellow-browns. I thought of Gabriel, of Khidr, of Suhrawardi's Perfect Nature, of my occasional perceptions of a celestial Self, of my heavenly Twin.
    A sense of presence grew, but without the flash of light that usually accompanies one of the high ones. The suggestion came: Rise from your body, and I will descend to you.
    I loosened physical focus, without separating from the body. I had the impression of a handsome young-seeming man of "Persian" appearance, wearing modern clothes, a suit and a shirt with banded collar. He carried something of the essence of Suhrawardi's teachings. He told me his name was "Shams". He suggested I should begin my journey to the realm of Hurqalya at Mount Qaf.
    I rose from bed and went back to the books. In the old Thackston translation of "The Red Intellect", one of Suhrawardi's visionary stories, Mount Qaf is described as follows:

Mount Qaf surrounds the world and consists of eleven mountains. When you are delivered of your bondage you will go there, for you have been brought from there, and eventually everything that exists returns to its initial forms.

The way through these mountains is fantastically difficult, but a traveler who has been there and returned counsels that "if you become Khidr you can easily cross Mount Qaf." Khidr is the guide of those who have no earthly guide.
    These words gave me shivers. Towards dawn, I drifted into sleep and dreamed:

WINGS OF SOUND

I am in a palace that is open to the winds, a place of soaring arches. It does not seem to stand on earth, but among the stars. It is roofless, open to the night sky, which is dark yet light at the same time, shimmering in every particle. There are twelve spacious rooms in the palace. Each contains marvelous musical instruments, shaped like butterfly wings. Some have multiple wings or leaves. They resembled stringed harps, yet the "strings" are so fine as to be invisible. Cosmic winds blow celestial harmonies through these wings of sound. I marvel at the beauty of these harmonies.

In a second dream:

THE PARS

I take a spiritual text and use it as the portico to two meditations, borrowing from more obscure sources. One of these is an invitation to the soul journey to higher realms. The other brings the power of meditation and concentration into everyday life.

I rose from these dreams buoyant, charged with energy, eager to return to my researches. I reopened Henry Corbin's Man of Light in Iranian Sufism and found Suhrawardi's hymn to Perfect Nature. Freely adapted, it contains this magnificent invocation of the Guide:

You, my lord and prince, my most perfect angel,
my precious spiritual being
You are the Spirit who gave birth to me
and you are the child who is born of my spirit
You are clothed in the most brilliant of divine lights
May you manifest yourself to me in the highest epiphany
Be my bridge-builder between the worlds
Lift the veils of darkness from my heart
Show me the radiance of your dazzling face

I have used these magnificent words, in guiding meditation and imaginal journeys in my circles of active dreamers, to open the heart and facilitate direct contact with the "soul of the soul," the Guide on a higher level. As in my dream, there is a two-way movement. We make a journey of ascension, rising from the heart center to the place of the Guide. Then we return, with heart, to carry the radiance of the Higher Self into embodied life.


*Suhrawardi is known as the Shaykh al-Ishraq, the Master of Illumination. He insisted that understanding reality requires "the knowledge of presence" - direct experience of realms beyond the physical. He wrote many works of visionary philosophy in Arabic, and spiritual tales including "The Red Intellect" in Farsi. He brought together the high traditions of the Greek neo-Platonists and ancient Persia with mystical Islam.  He is also known as "the murdered philosopher" because he was put to death in Aleppo in 1191 on the orders of the famous Saladin, who disapproved of Suhrawardi's influence over his son, who was governor of the city. According to Saladin's enforcer, Suhrawardi was crucified. 

Note: Suhrawardi has surfaced again in my life, and I am moved to re-post this narrative I first made public five years ago, based on my journals from 1998. A good story keeps coming back.
   
Book with Wings - Anselm Kiefer. The Modern Art Museum Ft Worth Texas. Photo by Timothy Boss.