Imagining Spirits on Both Sides of Death

 

Introducing Bardo Robert: If the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics is correct - and our universe is constantly splitting into countless parallel versions - then we have many alternate lives in which we are already dead in this world. For quite a few years I have been looking on on one of my possible alternate selves who has established a comfortable residence in the afterlife. Here's a sample of what I learn and test with him. I now call him Bardo Robert. I give some thought to the pas de deux we may be performing. When I am dead like him, is he alive as me?

For Democritus, the air is full of images. Everything sends out a film of itself. These images, or eidola, enter human bodies through the pores of the skin, generating dreams and visions and shaping perceptions of the world. The idea continues to prosper over centuries.
     In Latin, as in Lucretius, the Greek eidola become simulacra. In his important treatise De insomniis (On Dreams), composed around 405, Synesius says that we engage with the realm of living images in our phantastikon pneuma, a term the scholars have a hard time translating. Pneuma, for the bishop of dreams, is “the first body of soul”, one of several vehicles of soul/spirit alive in a human and active after death. Phantastikon means “of the imagination” (for which the Greek word is phantasia, not to be confused with fantasy in a trivial sense). Hence we might think of the imaginal spirit, or imagining spirit. When I was using only the old Augustine FitzGerald translation of Synesius [1], I did not fully appreciate the importance of this term – and the operations of the vehicle of consciousness and energy it describes. His language is explored in depth in the excellent academic commentaries that accompany a new bilingual edition of De insomniis with translation by Donald E. Russell.[2]
    Back to the eidola and the realm of living images. In modern language, we might say that we live among shifting holograms, emanated by everything around us and also from within us.
    I know a way of  projecting a dream reality from within and floating within it, inside a 360-degree bubble that can expand until it is as big as a world. Truly, work for an imagining spirit.
    I have an excellent teacher. He is an alternate Robert who has been at home on the Other Side for years of tick-tock time. I first became aware of him in a lucid dream in which I flew to an amazing scholar-city I sometimes call the School of Soul. The excursion began, like many of my adventures in lucid dreaming, with lying flat on my back in bed and allowing myself to drift in a state of relaxed attention or attentive relaxation. Then I formulated my intention for destination dream travel: I want to visit the School of Soul and learn more about the advanced courses on offer.
    As I approached the great scholar city with its many towers and spires, I was nudged by a knowing inner voice: Higher. I soared up to the roof terrace of an apartment building dozens of stories high. I felt entirely at home here. I swam in an infinity pool and explored a magnificent private library. I found it contained books by me that I have not written and may never publish on Earth. This confirmed the identity of the occupant of this penthouse in another world.
     He did not seem to be at home that day – unless, of course, he was me. Was I already dead, and dreaming of a continuing life on Earth? Had I slipped into a life on the Other Side? If so, had my double on the Other Side taken over my body on Earth? Or was I checking out a parallel life option for size and fit?
    Returning to my physical body left many questions unanswered. I was happy to have discovered a possible afterlife residence that I found highly attractive. The silence and neatness of the place were striking. So was its solitary nature. There was no sign of other people, even though the building could accommodate many hundreds, and the city millions.
    Maybe, on a return visit, I could sit down with the Robert who is at home in the afterlife and learn from him in direct conversation. I managed this a few times. He received me cordially, though I sometimes had the impression that I was intruding on his main activity, which I am pretty sure is similar to my own, to judge from all the books and research materials laid out on a vast desk far neater than any I have used.
    After a few visits. I realized that I had seen only part of his apartment.  I had never visited his bedroom. Does he even have one? After all, he presumably has no need of sleep in this reality. He obliged me by showing me a bed in a pleasant room, with French doors opening onto a balcony with flowering vines. So what goes on here?
    He invited me to lie down and dream as he does. I found that thoughts and images from inside me instantly took form around me, quickly composing a complete hologram that seemed entirely real, vibrantly alive. I floated in the waters of a wonderful sea cave, enjoying the scene with all the senses of my subtle body. I cruised in the pulsing night life of a great city. I sat in the royal box at an opera and took flowers to the leading soprano. I watched movies on eight screens in an octagonal viewing room, without confusion, then stepped through a screen into a director's chair. Mere fantasy, or reality creation? Either way, great fun.
    I am not uneasy about my double in the afterlife. I am delighted to think he has created a comfortable pied-à-terre in the next world that I might occupy, or at least a showroom where I can select the design for my own version.
    I was about to call him Dead Robert, but he won't stand for that. He would like me to call him Ever-Living Robert but that seems too grand. I'll call him Bardo Robert, aka imagining spirit, for now.
    Will Bardo Robert and I become one when I leave Earth? Step up to non-duality, and no doubt we find we are already one. A guide from a higher realm who proved to be no stranger once told me: We are one, but may talk as two. Is that what Bardo Robert and I have been doing?
    Right now, it feels more like a pas de deux, a soul duet. Watch the footwork. When I am dead like him, he is alive as me. 

1. Augustine FitzGerald (ed) The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)

2. Donald A. Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insommniis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2014)

 

Drawing: "Traveler" by Robert Moss

Synesius on the Dream Oracle

 

You have direct access to sacred knowledge, in your dreams. Your dreams are a personal oracle that reveals the future and helps you prepare for it. Don’t let anyone tell you what your dreams mean; get rid of dream dictionaries. Pay attention to signs from the world around you; know that everything in the universe is interconnected and constantly interweaving. Use your imagination. What you grow there will be stamped on your world and on your soul – on the energy body in which you will travel to another life after death. [1] 

Amazingly, these insights come from a fifth-century bishop of the church. His name was Synesius of Cyrene, and his treatise On Dreams, composed around 405, is one of the wisest books ever written on dreams, coincidence and imagination. Synesius was a most unusual bishop. In his life and work we find – alas, only briefly – a confluence between the best of the ancient practice of philosophy and the new religion of the Roman empire.

Synesius was a Greco-Roman aristocrat who could trace his pedigree back to the founders of Sparta, seventeen hundred years before him. He lived on a great estate in Cyrene, part of modern Libya, enjoyed the pleasures of both the hunt and the study, and chuckled over the fact that rural folk in his area still thought “the king of the world” was Agamemnon. [2]

 He had the best education possible in his time, in Alexandria, in the school of Hypatia, the extraordinary woman scientist, mathematician, and Neoplatonist who strode the streets of the world-city in her philosopher’s cloak, surrounded by eager students. 

It was in Alexandria that Synesius experienced his first and deepest conversion, when he found “the eye of the soul” within him opening to reveal the sacred depth of the universe. His consciousness expanded to give him the clear vision of the One beyond the many. He saw the reality behind the forms of religion. In his quiet hours, he dedicated himself to “mysteries without rites” devoted to awakening the divinity within the human that corresponds and coincides with the divinity within and beyond the cosmos. [3] He was a convert to philosophy as it was understood in the Greco-Roman world: the love and practice of wisdom. 

It was in Alexandria, around 405 and recently married, with the Barbarians at the gates of Rome, that he wrote his treatise on dreams. 

He makes it clear that his discussion of dreams is grounded in personal experience. Dreams have guided him in the hunt, showing him how and where to find the game. Dreams have led him to “swarms of wild beasts that have fallen to our spears”.[4]

He was guided by dreams when his city sent him to Constantinople to plead for favors from the emperor. In a hothouse of political intrigue, his dreams helped him to tell friend from foe, and alerted him to hostile intrigues in which his enemies hired “ghost-raising sorcerers” to attack him by black magic.

The dream oracle “helped me in the management of public office in the best interest of the cities, and finally placed me on terms of intimacy with the Emperor.”

His dreams contributed to his success as a writer and orator. The dream source “frequently helped me to write books”, correcting his style, and helping him to prune archaic Attic expressions – products of his love of old books - from his essays and poems. 

Synesius explains that dreams are “personal oracles”. We want to claim authority over our own dreams and reject anything and anyone who tries to come between us and the dream source. “We ought to seek this branch of knowledge before all else; for it comes from us, is within us, and is the special possession of the soul of each one of us.

The dream oracle speaks to us wherever we go. “We can’t abandon this oracle even if we try. It is with us at home and abroad, on the field of battle, in the city and in the marketplace.”

Dreams are our common birthright. They belong to rich and poor, to kings and to slaves. The dream oracle turns no one down because of race or age, status or calling.

Even the worst tyrant is powerless to separate us from our dreams – which may hold the key to his overthrow – “unless he could banish sleep from his kingdom”.

“Dream divination is available to all, the good genius to everyone.”

It is no wonder that dreams show us the future, because dreams are experiences of soul and “the soul holds the forms of things that come into being”

 Synesius dismisses dream dictionaries – popular in his time, as in ours – with admirable vigor. “I laugh at all those books and think them of little use”. General definitions don’t work because each dreamer is a different mirror for dream images – some are funhouse mirrors, some are made of varied materials. Big dreams do not require interpretation; their meaning is in the experience of the dream itself. Dreams that are “more divine” are “quite clear and obvious, or nearly so”, but come only to those who live “according to virtue”.

Steeped in Homer, he can’t avoid mentioning the scene in the Odyssey where the Gates of Horn and Ivory are described. In his view, both Homer’s Penelope and legions of commentators and borrowers failed to understand that dreams, in themselves, are never false. Penelope assumes that there are true dreams and deceptive dreams “because she was not instructed in the matter.” Deception arises through false interpretations, not false dreams. If Penelope had understood the nature of dreaming better, “she would have made all dreams pass out through the Gate of Horn…We should not confuse the weakness of the interpreter with the nature of the visions themselves.”

 Synesius recommends setting an intention for the night. “We shall pray for a dream, even as Homer prayed. And if you are worthy, the god far away is present with you…He comes to your side when you sleep, and this is the whole system of the initiation.”

 Synesius also stresses the value of keeping a dream journal, and of writing and creating from dreams. “It is no mean achievement to pass on to another something of a strange nature that has stirred in one’s own soul”.

 Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of signs and synchronicities as well as a “night book” for dreams.  “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”.

 Five years after writing his essay On Dreams, Synesius was persuaded by Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, to accept the bishopric of Ptolemais. It seems that he was baptized at the same time, rather late in the day according to our common understanding of what is involved in becoming a bishop of the church.

Synesius’ entry into the episcopate was a political, rather than a spiritual, event. The influence of his wife – who he loved deeply – may have been important; she was presumably Christian, since Theophilus was at their wedding in 403. Winning an aristocratic philosopher to the church was a coup for the Patriarch; though Christianity had become the religion of the empire, the old houses were still keeping their distance. For Synesius, assuming the rank and responsibilities of a bishop was both a case of noblesse oblige and an accommodation to the movement of history. In 399, the Serapeum – the great temple complex of Serapis at Alexandria – had been destroyed, and the might of the Roman Empire was now being used to stamp out pagan practices. The new God was fast supplanting the old ones.

In theological language, Synesius joined the Christians through adhesion rather than through the transformative experience of a full conversion. [5] But we can trace some possible lines of convergence between his philosophy and the Christian message. He believed in One divinity, behind the many forms of the divine. He wrote of the “fall” of the soul from a state of knowledge and truth. He believed that in times of darkness, a saving power may be sent to rescue humanity from itself and its deceivers. His essay On Providence depicts a world dominated by dark forces whose purpose is to drag humans down and destroy them if they reach for the light. Behind the surface events of history is the struggle between the higher instincts of humanity and the darkness within and around it. The power of light in humanity runs down, and must be restored periodically, at the end of the great cycles of history. But sometimes, when humans are in extremis, divine intervention may take place before the end of a cycle, to keep the game in play. [6] 

If Synesius lived long enough to learn the end of his mentor, Hypatia, he would have been left in no doubt that the darkness was rising. Though Hypatia’s students included Christians, the fanatical Cyril, who became bishop of Alexandria in 412, saw her as magnet for pagans. His violent diatribes against her helped to inflame a mob, led by a church lector, that pulled Hypatia from her carriage at night. In their collective dementia, these frenzied fundamentalists dragged her into a church called the Caesarium, tore off her clothes, and flayed her alive with sharp-edged shells. Then they butchered her body and burned the pieces to ashes. [7] 

In such a world, Synesius offered the means of communicating with a higher realm, and bringing gifts from it into everyday life. He taught that the realm of imagination is “the hollow gulf of the universe” where the soul is at home. Imagination is “the halfway house between spirit and matter, which makes communication between the two possible”. [Bregman 148] The soul travels in this realm in dreams.

For Bishop Synesius, dreaming is everyday church. It is also a way of entry into the real world. According to Synesius, dreamer do not return to reality when they awaken; dreaming, they are already there. 

 

 References

1. Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-Bishop. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 148.

2.ibid 76

3. ibid 26, 32-3,citing Letter 137.

4. All quotes from De insomniis (On Dreams) unless otherwise noted are from  Augustine FitzGerald (ed) The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)

 5. See A.A. Nock, Conversion. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).

6. Synesius, De providentia quoted in Bregman,op.cit., 66-72

7. Socrates Scholasticus, “The Murder of Hypatia” in Anne Fremantle (ed) A Treasury of Early Christianity. (New York: Viking, 1953) 380

 

Graphics: 

Lion at the Templeof Apollo in Cyrene

"Eye in the Sky" Journal Drawing by Robert Moss