Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self & Other Dream Drawings

 

My favorite activity first thing in the morning is to make a drawing from a dream. This delights the small boy and the artist in me, who are pretty much the same. I don't worry about technical execution, and use whatever I pull from my boxes of colored pencils and markers and oil or gel crayons and Neocolors.

Here are three recent productions:

January 17, 2023

Dream

Hermetic Fridge

My mind is still working on Neoplatonist texts I was studying late. I open the fridge and see a screen filling the upper half. It displays texts that appear in Greek and English translation and various symbols. I am able to read quite a lot. Then the screen flickers and living scenes appear. A woman in a flowing garment dances with a radiant being that descends in a shaft of light. I picture myself entering a similar column of light and ascending within it.

On a shelf in the fridge door is a slim rectangular case, like a laptop. This belongs to observers who are monitoring the transmissions.

I walk outside on our street, rehearsing exercises and meditations I have derived from my studies. When I take up the texts again, there is a satisfactory click: I have found a portal that was used by an ancient lineage of theurgists to enter another universe. A Speaker confirms my discovery and shows me how that universe looks from the outside.

Feelings: excited, intrigued

Reality check: I have been reading books by and about the Neoplatonists late into the nights. The fridge and the street in the dream are our new fridge and the scene right outside our building. I'm happy to think that ancient knowledge is right here where I live.

January 18, 2023

Dream

The Ambassadors Get Me to Ride a Kangaroo

I'm at a reception hosted by a Spanish grandee, Muy caballero. Many ambassadors are present. Drinks and canapes are flowing freely. My host tells me his guests would like to see me ride a kangaroo. Is this a joke? No, they actually have one. With great misgivings, I get on the animal's back (riding bareback) and we are flying. If this started as a joke, it is becoming something else.

Feelings: amused

Reality: I am an expat Australian. Aussies really don't ride kangaroos but long ago I knew an Aboriginal spirit man whose animal ally was a kangaroo - Big Red - that gave him the power of fast walking. In movement, kangaroos are in the air 80 percent of the time.

January 20, 2023

Dream

She Finger-Knits Herself Under a Red Blanket

People have gathered because the blonde is putting on quite a show. She is finger knitting a chunky red blanket while sitting inside it. She goes on - and up - until the blanket all but covers her head. Excitement rises because she is being timed. In a minute or so she'll be stopped. Will she finish in time? She adds to the tension by slowing her hands. Now I can barely see her skin and hair below the red strands. A few last loops and pulls and she's Done!

Feelings. Entertained

Reality: I know nothing about knitting. I don't think I know the blonde. Her style is of an earlier generation. I think of the Mad Men era. What's going on feels like a contest or publicity stunt. The last thing I read before bed was a line about an intuitive seeing a woman entirely covered in red

Sometimes I combine this exercise with bibiomancy by opening an old journal at random and seeing what pops us. Here are three drawings I made recently from "old" dreams I recorded more than twenty years ago that still convey terrific energy.

[Date of drawing: January 26, 2023]

Banyan Family

I found this in a much longer inner communication I recorded on May 22, 1999:

"You recall your almost erotic interest in the banyan of Lahaina, that replants itself. The banyan is an excellent model for the relationship between different life experiences – for your personal soul family. "

[Date of drawing: January 28, 2023]

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self

Journal report dated May 2, 1999

I am leading a group up a mountain along a spiral path. We pass a statue of a recumbent lion. What might be a saddle on his back is a giant carnelian glowing with deep red fire.

There is a tower at the top of a mountain. Through open doors we see an artist working on a painting, apparently a self portrait. Above and around it is a second, much larger portrait. It is nested inside a still larger picture, suggested rather than executed. And so on, and so up. Looking up I see that the tower has no roof and the walls seem to go up into the sky. Picture within picture, self within higher self. I doubt that the artist's work can ever be done but his passionate engagement is fueling a life of creative exploration charged with that carnelian fire.

One more, from a night vision I recorded more than thirty years ago:

[Date of drawing: January 24, 2023]

Bees Fly Me to the Epopteia

Journal report dated January 25, 1992

“Had” to lie down at 9:30 p.m. Immediately, I had the sense of being drawn up out of my body, of my whole second body lifting up. I saw a glow around my second body. I felt strong vibrations and heard a humming sound. I realized that a swarm of bees had massed around me, especially around my arms and shoulders, lifting me, helping me to fly.

I flew inside the swarm of bees, over an ocean, towards a temple on a rocky height. Greek words were streaming through my mind. Kyriacos. Epopteia.

Later, I grabbed relevant books from my shelves. Kyriacos means Lord or Ruler. The epopteia is the “full vision” or “full revelation" of the highest stage of the Mysteries, when the initiate is brought face-to-face with the deity. Of course I found many pages about bees as the companions of the Goddess and recalled that "honey bee" (melissa) is an ancient title of the priestess.

Drum spirits and real church

Paradise Island, Bahamas

After my last workshop at the ashram, I walk up the beach to the Atlantis resort in quest of some tiger food. The closest I come is a Caribe Spicy burger. A little black kitten jumps up on the windbreaker I have placed on the next chair and waits patiently until I share my late lunch with her, breaking off pieces of burger from the side not coated with jerk sauce.
   On the way back, there is an empty lifeguard's chair, the perfect throne for me to occupy while I watch the Atlantic waves and feed more of my spirits with a good cigar. A dark-skinned man approaches me. I recognize him from the ashram. He appreciates the cigar, telling me that another of his teachers, Malidoma Some, was often to be observed smoking a cigar in breaks from his workshops. We agree that we must feed our spirits, and different spirits require different sustenance.
   He tells me he is a drummer, and assisted Babtunje Olatunje, the renowned Yoruba drummer, in some of his performances at the Esalen Institute, where I am teaching again in April. He is eager to explain how he dreamed his way to a prize drum, made in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) over a hundred years ago. It has an unusual design, featuring huge hands and a pair of female breasts and other fertility symbols below the drumhead. In one of his dreams, he saw the shape of those great hands, clasping something unseen, and was told by a voice that he must take up drumming.
    After the message came again, he found himself in an antique shop in California filled with artifacts from many indigenous cultures. In the African section, he discovered the drum with the hands and the breasts and was certain it was the one he had dreamed. he ran his hand across the surface in a glissando. This sent out singing vibrations through the store that brought the owner running to see, "What was that?"
     Of course, my new friend wanted to buy the drum but he was a poor student at the time who did not even own a car. Playing another drum in a pop-up concert, he earned enough in donations to lay down a deposit, and then unexpected helpers came to enable him to complete the purchase - an anonymous benefactor, a generous reduction in price by the owner.
     "The drum was calling you," I commented. "And its spirits like you. They made everything possible."
     He agreed. "I know I am the custodian of this drum, and that those who came before are playing with me and through me."
     The conversation continued in this vein. I told him some tales of my own connection with spirits of Africa, especially the Yoruba. 

      He told me he had discovered an old, abandoned church nearby - "only the spirits live there now" - and after we parted company I set off to take a look. The atmosphere about the church was slightly sad and eerie, and I decided not go through the broken doorway.
     Then, just behind the church, late sunlight fell on a remarkable tree, a grandmother banyan. I approached her with reverence, offering the last of my tobacco. I knew that this tree is the real church, ancient and ever-living.

photos (c) Robert Moss