In the Voice of the Songbird

I am Marcella, called the Songbird because of my voice and because I can make men’s bodies sing. I can write my story in my own hand, because my father paid for a tutor. He was a merchant who sailed to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.
     Bruno brings me figs and young green olives of Lucca, the best of the new harvest. The cloth of gold that trims my dress belonged to my mother. The mad monk of Florence tried to kill her for wearing it, under his sumptuary laws. Witch, they called her, as they call me, though none dares to raise a hand against me so long as I have the favor of the bishop. I confess that I sewed the mouth of a toad shut to punish a calumniator for speaking against me and to silence his abuses, and that I melted a wax imago of Cosimo’s organ after he raped me.
     I will never marry, but I know men and they know me. There is no one in the city as practiced in the arts of love, though there are acts I will not perform, not even for the bishop.
    Bruno will guard my body with his life, and he is as strong as a bear. But I know I will not be allowed the fullness of my years. I have no wish to survive the withering of my body, still firm and juicy as a maiden’s after forty summers.
    I will heed the wishes of my sisters of the Hive. We are about in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message.

~

I wrote these lines after leading a group journey to real place in the Imaginal Realm, a Chamber of Mirrors where you can look into the lives of personalities in other times who are part of your multidimensional family. Participants in the workshop were asked to write an autobiographical statement in the voice of a personality of another time. The voice that wanted to speak through me was that of Marcella. Her reference to her mother's persecution by a "mad monk" (evidently Savonarola, a Dominican who ruled Florence and staged the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities before he was excommunicated and executed in 1498) suggests she lived in 16th century Italy. I am glad to know her, because in most of my impressions of past lives closely associated with my own, I have found myself linked to men, typically men of power.
     Where are the women? I have often asked myself. Oh, there is that woman of the future; I feel her even now, as I write. She is a priestess and a scientist, working to restore our world, seven generations into the future. Dreaming is central to her practice and that of her Order, and I am driven by a sense of obligation to her, the obligation - through my work as a dream teacher - to help make her possible.
    Perhaps Marcella and I will now be able to share gifts. In psychological terms, such episodes may mean that I am getting more deeply in touch with my female side, and I would be happy with that. Except that the encounter also feels transpersonal. Jane Robert's Seth insists that "the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences. Abilities cannot be developed by following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood." Perhaps I am making a little progress.
     Marcella hints at an Order of women content to call themselves a Hive. I have encountered this language, and similar women, in other times and other lands, "in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message", just as Marcella says.

Illustration: Portrait of Beatrice d'Este by Bartolemeo Veneto (1510) Public Domain

Perennial Lessons of Oversoul 7

 "Let's see...I'm a man on Wednesday and Friday, a woman on Sunday and Thursday, and I have the rest of the time off for independent study.

   "Actually...this is somewhat more complicated. Each life is lived in a different area of time to which various designations are given. As Lydia I'm in the twentieth century, as Josef in the seventeenth, as Ma-ah in 35,000 B.C., and as Proteus in the 23rd century, A.D."

As the opening of a novel, this is hard to beat as an attention-grabber. I remember sitting forward in my seat, catching my breath, the first time I read these lines in the summer of 1988, fifteen years after they were written. If you don't recognize the source, maybe it's time for you to go find it, even if you think you don't like didactic fiction. The Education of Oversoul 7, the first of a trilogy by Jane Roberts, presents a working model of our possible relationships with personalities connected to us in other places and times, and with intelligences on higher levels of being and consciousness.

     The speaker on the opening page is Oversoul 7. He is a fallible being, responsible for four very fallible humans facing different, yet interrelated, challenges in different places in time, from the Ice Age to a future in which most humans are "floaters" living in a plastic environment suspended above the Earth.
     The first lines of the novel are not a spoiler, because we soon come to understand that things are even more complex and exciting than Oversoul 7 understands at this point. He is not some all-knowing "spirit guide" or guardian angel. Though to a certain extent he can play guide and teacher to his trans-temporal set of human charges, he is answerable to his own mentor and supervisor on a level above himself. This mysterious entity, who never stays long in any single form, is identified as Cyprus. It is hinted that Oversoul 7, like the humans he supervises, may be one of a set of "oversouls" all related, and subject, to Cyprus. Most certainly, Oversoul 7 is no "master". He is a student whose classroom is the world. All his engagements with his human personalities are tests on which he is being graded.

      When he's reporting to Cyprus, as he is doing in the opening scene, Oversoul Seven generally adopts the default appearance of a fourteen-year-old boy, very appropriate since in relation to higher intelligence he is a schoolboy. When his humans perceive him, most often in dreams, they see him as a wise old man. His ability to stay present to all four of his human personalities and help out in times of crisis is impeded by his tendency to play favorites and get drawn into one of the dramas, while losing track of the other three.

      Thus the first great lesson we derive from the adventures of Oversoul 7 is: the teacher is a student too. Our ability to gain from our teachers and communicate with the Self on higher levels will be severely limited until we understand this simple and fundamental truth.

      The second great lesson, for us, in the Oversoul 7 story is that we may have relationships with personalities in other times and other probable realities, past and future, that are intensely relevant to our current life dramas - and that all these lives are going on now. What is happening in 35,000 B.C. can change a situation today, and what is happening in the 23rd century can inspire and transform the life of a painter living in the 17th century. There are constant "bleed-throughs" between one life and another life, rarely noticed by humans on the ground except in dreams that are frequently forgotten.

      That is the third great lesson: that to understand how all of this works first-hand, we need to become more active and conscious dreamers.

      The fourth great lesson, for me, is this: yes, reincarnation is possible, but it is not automatic and it does not operate only according to the rules of linear time. One of Oversoul 7's favorite personalities is Lydia, a feisty, chain-smoking woman writer who has set off in a well-furnished trailer, at seventy-three, for a sunset romance with her younger lover. 

       In the first Oversoul 7 novel and in its sequel (The Further Education of Oversoul 7) we follow Lydia's journey through death and the choices she comes to make when her understanding of the soul (which she wasn't sure about in life) begins to grow. She enjoys herself, for a time, in a young and attractive body in a personal post-death world she builds from her desire and imagination. When this begins to pall, she eventually agrees to be reborn as the child of a person in the family of selves that Oversoul 7 is supervising. She will take up residence of a baby that will be born in the seventeenth century. Her past life will be her future life. By my own experience and observation, by the way, such things are entirely possible.

     There are profound and perennial lesson here. 

      This is fiction, right? Yes and no. For one thing, it is grounded in Jane's long engagement with the entity called Seth who dictated a series of books that - to my mind - contain one of the best working models of the multidimensional self. Jane, a brilliant original thinker and writer as well as a gifted psychic medium, shows here that she knows how to bring ideas to vivid life, in many voices.

       Here she gives a marvelously animated version of some of Seth's central propositions including this: "You have other centuries to play with. In the dream state, you meet and interact with our own reincarnational selves. I prefer that you think of them as simultaneous selves. In the dreaming condition, there's a great interchange of information with these other portions of your selves." (Seth Speaks)
      Then again, when I consider genres, I remember a young boy who was once in line ahead of me for a library sale. His mother asked him if he knew the difference between fiction and nonfiction. This was his response: "Nonfiction is what you think in your head. Fiction is what you see."
      The Oversoul 7 stories are books through which we see. For me, the idea of reincarnation in a "previous" time is entirely plausible. But don't let's just sit on the sidelines discussing these things. Like Jane Roberts' "Seth" books, the Oversoul 7 novels are an incitement to gather first-hand knowledge of these matters by dreaming on them.

I write about the impact of the Seth material and the Oversoul 7 books in a critical phase of my own life in chapter 13 of The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Digital image: "Window for Oversoul 7" by RM

White Shadows

 

White Shadows

When you walk usually you don't see

the white shadow walking beside you
who may stray behind a hedgerow
or veer away into a dark wood
or a tall city full of thrusting agendas
different from your own, or into a love bower
you left behind, or never made.

Your co-walker may swap places
with another white shadow, and another.
This is a parallel self who made other choices,
who stayed with your former lover,
or still works in the old job, or never crossed the sea,
or chose pancakes instead of waffles for breakfast.

Though the veil between you is thinner
than shrink-wrap, you rarely see through it
except in your dreams, where you enter the life
of an alternate self who has trouble remembering

the alternate self you inhabit this side of the dreamlands.

Yet when your paths converge with a parallel self
you feel something, obscurely, a tilt to the day,
and may notice you are drawing events and encounters

in a different way. People praise you or put you down
in ways you can't fathom unless you awaken to how
you are loaded now with karma of your white shadow

incurred in adventures you can't know about

until you follow the tracks of your multitudinous self.

- from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

Photo by RM: "My Double Walks Before Me"

Do Not Let Your Mind Fall: On the Practice of Anamnesis

“The whole of world history often seems to be nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity’s most powerful and senseless desire – the desire to forget.”

- Herman Hesse, Journey to the East

Active Dreaming, as I teach and live it,is a practice of soul remembering: reclaiming the knowledge that belonged to us on the level of mind and spirit before we came here, and our relationship with the collective odyssey of our kind and with all that is alive and conscious in our world. When I was a boy, one of my invisible friends was a wise teacher who appeared as a radiant young man who seemed to come from the eastern side of the Mediterranean. He told me that the most important things I would ever know would come by way of anamnesis, which literally means "remembering" but has the deeper meaning mentioned above. This is perhaps the most important teaching I have ever received and I seek to live by it. Anamnesis is a way of direct experience. Growing your dream recall is excellent everyday practice in the art of soul remembering. You wake up to the fact at all times you are present in many worlds. You realize that you are never confined to the body or to linear time except by your lack of courage or imagination. Learning to journey to the place between lives - to where you were, let us say, a little before conception and a little after death - is vital practice. It will give you first-hand confirmation that consciousness survives physical death, which may enable you to see the dramas of current life as part of a divine comedy. Recalling that you may have come to this world on an assignment is an essential part of anamnesis. I was once jolted awake at 3 in the morning by a knock on the door of my house. When I went to the door, I found a smiling young man, under bright moonlight, who introduced himself by saying, "I come from my father's house." He then shocked me by asking, "What is your contract with God?" I now came out of the dream, knowing that the visitation was entirely real, and hugely important. If I had a contract with God, how could I have forgotten it? Though the question was not couched in my usual language, it set me the task of revisiting choices I made before I became Robert in this life. This reopened direct links to personalities in other times. For the Pythagoreans, anamnesis specifically involved mental communication with other members of a reincarnational lineage of initiates. The Neoplatonist Proclus, who consulted with Plutarch in the middle of the night, saw that great moralist and biographer as a previous incarnation of his own essence. As I explored my own connections with my counterparts in other times and other dimensions I came to the conclusion that from the perspective of a Greater Self, it is all going on Now. We are not simply engaged in reincarnational dramas, but members of a multidimensional families whose actions affect each other across time. Anamnesis, in the history (past and future) of our kind, requires us to master the arts of what I have called dream archaeology. We have the ability, as shamanic dreamers,to enter the living experience of our kind in other times and other circumstances, to learn from this,and even to communicate, mind to mind, with people who are connected with us in those situations. We can do this within our own lives.We can journey to a younger self to act as the mentor and cheerleader she may desperately need in a tough transition. We can journey to a possible older and hopefully wiser self to gain perspective from what she or he has lived, beyond what we know.

For humans, anamnesis involves more than remembering all that it means to be human, part of the odyssey of our species on a blue planet orbiting a medium-size star, joined in a common ancestry that starts with an ancient Eve in Africa or someone before her. It means remembering that we live in a fragile ecosphere on the skin of Gaia with responsibility for all that shares life with us on her body. It means remembering that we are made of seawater and the dust of a distant star, and that our knowledge of our full identity and purpose may depend on remembering the experience of another world. The First Peoples of the area where I live - the Onkwehonwe, or Iroquois - say that our world began when Sky Woman fell from another world, called Earth-in-the-Sky. to dance our world into being on Turtle's back. They say that we fall into the Dark Times when we forget the life and the knowledge of that other world. In Mohawk, a language I had to study because of my dreams, when you tell someone to remember you say Tosa 'sasa' nikon'ren. This literally means, "Do not let your mind fall." In other words: Remember the higher world where your life and purpose have their source. I wrote a little poem about

The Art of Memory

Dreaming, waking or in between
in any part of the multiverse
in any body, in any life
you are invited to play
a memory game.

Whatever world you are in
the trick is to remember
the other worlds you inhabit
where you are dead and more alive
and the self that is dreaming you.

Picture: Ziggurat abode of the Moon god Nanna at Ur

A shelf elf throws The Dream of H.G.Wells at me

Just before I sat down to write this morning a shelf elf flung H.G.Wells’ novel The Dream at me from the top of a tall bookcase holding fiction in the room where I do much of my horizontal meditation. Of course I had to interrupt what I thought I was doing and explore the themes I had just been given. In the last pages on Wells' novel I read:

    "It was a life," said Sarnac, "and it was a dream, a dream within this life; and this life too is a dream. Dreams within dreams, dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the Dreamer of dreams, the Being who is all beings."

     In the novel a man living 2000 years in the future falls asleep in a ruined city and dreams he is in the body and life of a man in London in the early 20th century. The dream is presented as an entirely real experience of another life.
     Another character in the novel reports a dream of a shorter, wilder life experienced in a very different body.

    "I dreamed the other day that I was a panther that haunted a village of huts in which lived naked children and some very toothsome dogs. And how I was hunted for three years and shot at five times before I was killed. I can remember how I killed an old woman gathering sticks and hid part of her body under a tree to finish it on the morrow. It was a very vivid dream. And as I dreamed it by no means horrible. But it was not a clear and continuous dream like yours. A panther's mind is not clear and continuous, but passes from flashes of interest to interludes of apathy and utter forgetfulness."

    The theme that personal evolution involves relations between past, present and future personalities - alternate and other selves - was of consuming interest to Wells, though many of his readers have missed this aspect of his work. After The Dream, he wrote Christina Alberta's Father, a novel in which a man of modest circumstances thinks he is simultaneously, across time, King Sargon of Akkad.
    The framing device of the dream was used repeatedly by Wells (see A Dream of Armageddon). He also makes us aware that a dream of this kind is more than a literary device; it is a portal to real experiences in other times and other worlds. I have heard that Wells himself dreamed of life as Sargon, who gets a glowing report in his Outline of History.

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.

We must live into our own time

We must live into our own time.

The memories of the broken cord,
the nest emptied of its young,
the lost love, the knocking at the ribs,
at the midnight door, the starling silences
cannot help us here.

Yet their tremulous rising,
dropletted as from the dawn sea,
is almost more than we can bear
and enough to turn houses upside down,
break families and the destiny of a present life.

There is danger in knowing our other selves,
danger in remembering too much, too soon,
of what lay beyond the stiff portal of birth.

Yet life itself in its endless wheelings
through the blur of feathers, through wind and sun
brings us face to face with the Other -
face of desire, face of the heart’s highest longing,
face of red hatred, face of cold fear -
and we are called, backward or forward
(whose time prevails now?)
into another life, and the forking paths of soul.

- Lines about soul in the multiverse recorded on a napkin in an Irish pub, nearly quarter of a century ago. And they stir my heart again, and I feel connections with other dramas, in other times, stir with me.

photo by RM

Soul in the multiverse: serial dreamers and quantum jumpers

Serial dreams, in which we find ourselves returning, again and again, to a life that is not our waking life offer an invitation to gather first-hand data on the possibility that we are leading parallel lives in alternate realities that may also be parallel worlds.

    Some serial dreams may reflect that fact that one or more of our soul-selves is “out there”, leading its own life in an alternate reality that is separated from that or our dominant personality. But serial dreams of this type open windows into even more spacious possibilities.
    While you are living your present life, on your present timeline, co-walkers are walking beside you, near or far, along their own paths, which branched off when they made different choices or took a different turning. There is the parallel self who stayed with your former lover, the white shadow that still works in the old job. If parallel universes are infinite, as some physicists believe, you have a parallel self who chose pancakes instead of eggs for breakfast, and another that has not opened this book.
     When it comes to studying parallel selves who took a radically different life path, developing different skills and relationships and incurring different karma, it is fascinating to consider what happens when two paths start to converge again. Before you are remotely aware that this is happening, you may feel a certain tilt to the day, and notice that you are drawing events and encounters in an unusual way. People praise you or put you down in ways you can't fathom unless you awaken to how you are loaded now with karma a parallel self incurred in adventures you can't know about unless you are following the dream tracks of your multitudinous self.        
     What if it were possible to reach to some of these alternate selves, and share gifts and life experiences with them in mutually supportive ways? We can attempt that through dream reentry. We can also seek to journey back to a crossroads on our previous life road, and seek to locate and then track the  parallel self that made a different choice from what put us where we are now. We can choose to follow the life of this alternate self from that moment of choice all the way up to the present time, make an inventory of what went wrong or right on that other path and then - most importantly - to harvest lessons and gifts from the alternate life trajectory

-   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.

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

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 the theory of Many Interactive Worlds. 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.     

Jane Roberts’ version of how this works, in the Seth books that she channeled and in her own Oversoul Seven novels, is the clearest and most coherent account of how this works that I have so far discovered.    Part of the secret logic of our lives is that we are all connected to counterpart personalities—Seth calls them “probable souls”—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.

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

Drawing by RM

Dreaming yourself in a different body

Have you dreamed of being in the situation and seemingly the body of another person?
    Maybe you looked in a mirror and saw a quite different face. Maybe, as you left the dream, you noticed you were wearing clothes of the opposite sex (and are not a cross-dresser). Maybe you weren't aware that you were not your regular self until you tried to figure out the who, what, when, where of what was going on in the dream.
    Experiencing things with the perspective and senses of another person is a common experience for psychic dreamers, which frequently requires them to pause and ask: who am I in this dream? This kind of transference is especially common, by my observation, among women who are closely related, as mother-and-daughter, sisters, intimate friends, They wake with information that may be disturbing or delightful, and then have to check on whether the details are actually from another's person's life and imminent future.
     In dreams, we enter parallel lives in which we are traveling roads abandoned or not taken on our current event tracks. We also enter the lives and apparently the bodies of characters who are quite different from our present selves. In this way, we learn about our family of personalities connected across time and place within the multidimensional self. We gain insight into past life dramas - whether they belong to an ancestor or a previous incarnation of our spirit - that are relevant to our present life choices.
    Of course, dreams in which we inhabit different identities reveal different aspects of our personalities, including the ones Jung called the shadow and the anima or animus. Yet the experiences can also be transpersonal.
    Such "body-hopping" experiences can also expand our humanity. They open the locks between different kinds of people and different levels of society. As a mere man, I am grateful for dream adventures in which I find myself in a woman's body. As a white man from a fairly privileged background, I am grateful for dream experiences that take me inside the life situations of people of different ethnicity in far less privileged circumstances. As an Anglo whose three countries of residence - Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States - have not been invaded or occupied in recent generations, I am grateful for dream episodes in which I am in the situation of a person seeking to survive under conditions of war and occupation.
     I am smiling now as I remember one of my most entertaining, and increasingly relevant, nights of body-hopping dreams.
     More than 20 years ago, I found myself, in a dream sequence that became lucid, in a series of unfamiliar bodies. In the first episode, I am in the body of a black basketball player. I enjoy the things he can do with his magnificent athletic body, and his very active sex life. Then, as an unpleasant scene involving racial bigotry is starting to develop, an inner voice warns, "Get out before you succumb to his rage."
    I blink my eyes. In the next instant, I am in a very different body. It belongs to a prosperous middle-aged white guy in plaid pants who is playing golf with his buddies at a Midwestern country club, The scene makes me think of Dan Quayle. It is heaven to the golfer, hell to me. I scream inwardly, Get me out of here!
    Now, in the climactic scene, I am in the body and situation of an eccentric, independent scholar of a certain age. He is free to purchase any book he likes and add it to his three-floor home library. He is weaving mental connections between different cultures and practices beyond what anyone has done before. He is highly respected by those who read him and attend his classes, but he remains very human, even humble.
    I like his life. I don't like the pains he feels in his legs. What happened to his right knee? What is that occasional stabbing pain in his left heel?
    Still, I'll take his life over the others, any day.
    Twenty years later - seven years since I injured my right knee, a year since bursitis in my left heel was diagnosed - I recognize I am in the body of that eccentric scholar. It does not take higher math to count the three floors of the home library that is now mine. When you find yourself in another body in a dream, don't dismiss the chance that it is a body that you will some day occupy.

Photo: Locks by Wanda Burch

Time and the dreamer

I look at my watch. It is nearly 4:20. I must get on with my lecture. I close my eyes.
    I am standing before to a group of forty or fifty people seated in chairs arranged in a relaxed horseshoe pattern. It is rather irritating that behind the audience is a café area where people are talking quite loudly. At one point, I have to call to the café crowd to keep it down, and they do.
    My subject is time, and the dreamer’s relationship with time. I talk briskly and smoothly about how, especially in dreams, consciousness is forever traveling ahead of the body, returning with reports about conditions on the roads ahead. We can use these travelogues from the future to make better choices at the crossroads that lie before us.
     I next talk about how we also travel into the past. We visit scenes from our earlier lives. We visit other eras across history, sometimes as observers, sometimes entering fully into the mind and experience of other personalities. I talk about how we need to discern carefully whether we are dealing with ancestors, spiritual kin, reincarnational dramas – or counterpart personalities living in other times and other realities.
     To get a handle on all of this, I suggest, we need to rise to the perspective of a self on a higher level, a hub personality or oversoul. From this perspective, we may be able to recognize that a number of personalities – including our present selves – are joined to a central personality, a slightly higher self, as spokes join the hub of a wheel. Looking from this position, from above and beyond linear time, we can see that the dramas of many personalities are playing in the same spacious Now, and turn with each other.
    This is all being received well, but I keep looking at my wristwatch because I am determined to finish in precisely forty minutes, on the hour. I succeed.
    I open my eyes and look at the wristwatch I left on my bedside table. It is precisely 5:00 in the morning. The time I spent giving my lecture, in my dream, exactly coincided with the time that I lay in bed. Contrary to what people may say, dreamers can get things done on time.

Afternote

Sports psychologists report that athletes get the same benefits from practice or workout in dream/visualization as in physical reality, but that full value depends on doing the exercises over the same time period.  I was intrigued by my experience of conducting a dream activity  (in this case, giving a lecture) in exactly the same period of linear time that would be required in ordinary reality. However, the great thing in general about dream time is that it is almost infinitely elastic, so we can have experiences that would take days or longer in a few minutes, when that pleases us and our dream helpers.

Art: René Magritte, "Time Transfixed" (1938) Art Institute of Chicago

The Ancient One and the Fourteen

What I know of this comes from the mind of the ancient one whose skin is the color of fine white ash. He wears only the hide of a leopard. He sits looking into the mirror of a pool of water. The mirror catches the blue-white light of a distant star in an indigo sky, shining down through the smoke hole of the conical hut.

     The ancient one reads other things in the water, the intersection of purposes projected from another world with human lives. As he reads the patterns, he scores lines with his forefinger in the bed of fine powder at his feet.

     There is a swirling in the water. A vortex opens at its center, turning very fast. Then the swirling reverses direction and the water gathers in a spout that spurts high into the air. From the hard spray, a new pattern emerges. The water moves in a way that water cannot move. Fourteen ridges appear, moving rapidly from the center, running to the edges of the pool. The ancient nods and notes the event in the dust, in his binary code of single and double lines. 

12th century bronze head of a Yoruba king in the British Museum

The Fourteen

R.M., "The Moon at the Foot of My Bed"

The Fourteen

Some days, I don’t remember how I got here, or what I’m supposed to be doing. But today, on the eve of the lunar eclipse, it seems to me that my prior residence was the Moon. There was a mix-up at the time of my conception, for which I tried to press charges against the Zygote Fairy. But she convinced the court that it was my own doing, because I was excessively curious about sex.

I sit now with a ball in my hands. From it strands extend in all directions across time and space. Fourteen silver threads are attached to my body, a little above the navel. One runs to the ball, the others link me to counterparts in other places and times: to the man with skin the color of powdered ash who crouches over a mirror of water in a conical hut in Africa; to the young woman of the future who is priestess and scientist in an Order of dreamers; to the elegant flaneur who strolls with a beautiful woman on his arm through the Paris of Victor Hugo; to the feathered shaman living wild on Deer Mountain. Our work and our passions tug on the web that joins us. When I remember the pattern, I can work the strands like bell-ropes, to signal to another self. Or I may follow a thread into the mind of that other self, in his own world.

We, the Fourteen, came here in the same throw, aspects of a single purpose, operating outside time. My assignment, when I remember it, is to link consciously with my counterparts and serve the plan that unites us.

This was the product of a 10-minute timed writing exercise I led in a workshop at Mosswood Hollow, where I am leading a five-day adventure in Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming in April.

Mother Africa, and other female incarnations

She is vast, like the continent itself. She sits under a great baobab tree in the center of the village marketplace. She is mountainous under the folds of her bright crimson dress. She wears a matching red headdress and heavy chains of gold around her neck. When people come for her counsel, she sometimes reaches for a gourd in which she keeps the cowrie shells and stones and bones that she casts on a well-brushed layer of powder inside her divining tray, to get a second opinion from the ancestral spirits. The top of the gourd has been cut so that it opens and closely like a box.

I remember her youth. She was brought among her present people as a captive with a choke collar around her neck. Lissome and nubile, she was taken by force by the tribal king. Years later, when that chief tried to hang himself from this very tree, she cut him down and raised him up, cleansed and healed in body and mind, to be a better ruler. Like the baobab, she renews herself - and helps to renew herself - endlessly. I feel humbled and blessed to be able to share her life memories and to imagine myself, if only for a moment, sharing her life as the wisdom of her people, under that great tree.

This is a brief report of one of my experiences during a group journey in quest of the multidimensional self during a workshop I led last weekend. I invited the spirited members of our circle to direct their awareness to a Tree of Vision we had grown in a standing meditation and feel themselves rising up to a place of observation among the high branches. I suggested that they could then look out towards the four cardinal directions and connect with a personality in a different time and culture whose life experience was relevant to them now. We then used shamanic drumming to power and focus a group adventure in lucid dreaming. It was remarkably successful.

I had a personal agenda for this journey. I wanted to connect with female personalities in other times and places. In most of my impressions of "past lives" closely associated with my own, I have found myself linked to men, typically men of power. A Royal Air Force pilot in World War II. An ancient Chinese general. A Scottish druid in a cloak of raven feathers. A figure in the high white crown of Upper Egypt, studying his own family of counterparts in mirrors of water or metal. Where are the women? I have often asked myself. Oh, there is that woman of the future, and I feel her even now, as I write. She is a priestess and a scientist, working to restore our world, seven generations into the future. Dreaming is central to her practice and that of her Order, and I am driven by a sense of obligation to her, the obligation - through my work as a dream teacher - to help make her possible. But where are the women of the past?

Mother Africa (as I'll call her, though I also know her personal name) is one, and I am privileged to know her. Perhaps we will now be able to share gifts. Another, I now know, is a magical woman of the Scottish islands who is of the sea as much as of the land, and is clothed in the gifts of the sea. Yet another is a beautiful woman of ancient Persia about whom I will hope to learn more. And I find that, since last weekend, I am starting to find my dream self sharing the experiences of woman as if he has taken up temporary residence in their bodies; I reported one of these in my parallel blog at beliefnet this morning.

In psychological terms, such episodes may mean that I am getting more deeply in touch with my female side. Yet they also feel transpersonal, as if I am connecting with - and sometimes entering into the minds and bodies of - personalities in other times and places who may be part of my family of selves, within the structure of the multidimensional self. Jane Robert's Seth (in Seth Speaks) insists that "the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual expereinces. Abilities cannot be developed by following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood." If this is so, perhaps I'm on the right track. I will be most interested if you wish to share personal experiences relevant to this theme.

Baobab photo by Bernard Gagnon

You stand at the center of all times

I'm on my way to open a new workshop on exploring the multidimensional self, in a wonderful airy studio in the woods just outside Mystic, Connecticut, under the full moon of October.

My travel reading includes Seth Speaks. I see from the flyleaf that I first read this book, channeled by an entity named Seth by Jane Roberts, back in 1988, when I was trying to make sense of some profound, indeed revolutionary, experiences of my own in the universe beyond the five senses. Though generally resistant to channeled material, I found here a very clear and helpful model for reality creation and for understanding relations between the ordinary self, personalities in other times and places, and the self on a higher level. I went on to read everything I could find in print by Jane Roberts and Seth, including Jane's wonderful Oversoul 7 trilogy.

So I start the day (after noting some dreams from the night) by opening Seth Speaks at random for a thought for the day. I find this:

Knowing your reincarnational background, but not knowing the true nature of your present self, is useless. You cannot justify or rationalize present circumstances by saying, "This is because of something I did in a past life," for within yourself now is the ability to change negative influences.

Yes. And this can be applied to the lives we may lead within one single span of years. As a matter of fact, if we want to grasp the nature of reincarnation we would do well to study how we can rebirth ourselves several times within our present lifetimes.

When you change your life utterly - as I did in the period when I first read Seth Speaks (and was dreaming of an ancient native "woman of power" who required me to learn Mohawk in order to understand her) - you may find you have some karma to deal with, bequeathed by your former selves. You may be distracted by "bleed-throughs" from "probable selves" (as Seth would call them), parallel versions of you who made different choices and are walking not far from you, on paths you abandoned.

Your power is now. You stand now at the center of all times and dimensions. Your challenge is to explore how much it is possible to influence for the good of all through the choices you now make.

-

Hindu vision of a chain of reincarnation. Image from Himalayan Academy Publications, Kauai.

Giant grey sheep opens the way to a guide

I am swimming in a very clean canal with green meadows to my left. I've been told that if I keep going this way I can swim directly to the great country house where a meeting will take place; the name of this house is something like "Cairncross".

I see a grey sheep grazing. It must be the size of an elephant. It has a black face, curly horns and black legs and the head is quite small in proportion to the vast body. I guess that sheep of this kind are bred for meat rather than wool. I remember being told that my hosts would roast an animal for dinner; maybe it will be a sheep like this.

The canal is getting quite shallow. Soon I can no longer swim without scraping my chest or belly against the gravelly floor. I get out and notice a large body of water to my right, perhaps a lake. I can just slide down the bank and continue my swim there.

Interruption: My 11-pound puppy wakes me up, barking for me to lift him back up on the bed.

Feelings: Intrigued. Frustrated at being pulled out of the dream.

Reality: I recall that in the Celtic immrama (voyage tales) you know you have reached the Otherworld when there is a dramatic shift in scale. For example, the voyagers come to an island with ants the size of calves.

Action: When my puppy is settled, snuggled down in the small of my back, I decide to reenter and continue the dream.

Reentry experience:

Easy to get back to the giant sheep and the canal. I go down the bank into the lake. The water is delightful, but I am soon aware that there are other inhabitants. I catch a glimpse of them. They are giant eels the size of treetrunks, armed with many rows of spiky teeth. They are blind, but are drawn to movement. I decide it's prudent to continue my journey along the edge of the lake.

I come to a rise and see, through woods, another body of water below me. A giant yellow fish, the size of a marlin, breaks surface and I decide that perhaps I won't be swimming here either. There's the back of a house visible through the trees. Maybe this is my destination.

I come to a gate in a high wire fence, and step through. This must be the back entrance. I pass a group of people eating what may be Thanksgiving Dinner. In contrast to the giant sheep, these people are smaller than ordinary human sized. The men are all dressed alike in longish black coats that remind me of butlers' livery. The woman are wearing copious country clothes, patterned like tablecloths.
They don't seem aware of my presence and I don't feel I have anything to learn from them.

I enter the house and find myself in a huge room that looks like the builders left it unfinished. The walls are untreated plasterboard and plywood. There are just a few sticks of furniture and a kitchen nook with very basic appliances and cupboards.

I become aware that a guide is present. I don't see him distinctly, but I sense he is larger than normal human size. However, even his gender is indistinct. I receive his thoughts directly. Our dialogue begins like this:

- Why is this room unfinished?
- It's waiting for you to choose the design and decor.

I think: I'd like a blue room. Instantly the walls are powder blue, hung with gilt-framed mirrors and set off with gilded boulle tables, very rococo French, with touches of Fragonard. I find the effect cloying, and substitute library colors and features, deep greens and cordovans.

This fooling around with room design is not why I am here. I remember now that I am seeking to learn more about how we can keep in touch with multiple personalities - all related within the multidimensional Self - who are living and acting in different times.

The Guide produces a sphere. It floats in midair, soft white and opaque.

- Go inside

It's as simple as thought. I project myself into the center of the sphere. Around me, in every direction, scenes from different lives in different times are playing, as if on multiple holographic movie screens. Sometimes an element from one of these life "movies" will bleed through into another movie. Sometimes what is going on in one of the lives can touch and influence all of them.



Photo: Gotland sheep