Book of Shadows

Between you and the world
falls a screen
that holds the fingerprints of possibility.
Study them like a detective
and you find clues to the future
you can use to change it
or embrace it.

Look carefully and you may find
the screen is smudged 
by old habits and regrets
and must be cleansed
before you can trust the patterns.

On some days, in many lives,
you don't see that the screen is there.
That's when movies start playing
that you confuse with the world.
You can get stuck in a Book of Shadows
not knowing how to turn the page.
You may be caught in the threads
of an ancient tapestry
of a sleeping king and a red boar.

The trick is to touch
the friable ridges of fate
tenderly and harvest fine powder
to make inks and paints
to create your own designs for life.
Since the screen between you and the world
becomes your world
use it to make your own reality.
The time is Now.

- Robert Moss

Conscious Dreaming in the Real World

I used to avoid the term “lucid dreaming” because it was often associated with approaches that promised to teach people to “control” and “manipulate” their dreams. The discussion has matured greatly since then, though if you cruise the web you’ll find plenty of hucksters promising to teach you how to be a master of the universe or have guilt-free sex with anyone through lucid dreaming.

    I chose the title Conscious Dreaming for my first book on all of this. In my mind, being conscious means more than being lucid. It means being aware that at every turning, in every state of reality and consciousness, you can exercise choice. At the very least, you can choose your attitude, and that can change everything. You want to be prepared, always, to test the limits of possibility.

    In my experience, it is less important to be aware that we are dreaming than to be capable of exercising choice, pursuing goals and considering consequences, whatever state of reality and consciousness we may be in.
    The ability to embark on dream journeys at will, travel to certain locations, contact transpersonal beings and exercise wakeful powers of goal-setting and decision-making in the dream state  is what is prized by traditional dreaming peoples. In other words, they rank volitional dreaming above lucid dreaming, to employ a helpful distinction suggested by anthropologists Roger Ivar Lohmann and Shayne Dahl in a recent essay.[1]
      As a lucid dreamer, you may experiment with creating environments in nonordinary reality where you can live out your wildest fantasies or engage in training or meditation. I am greatly in favor of practicing reality creation on the imaginal plane. However, you don’t want to fall into the delusion that everything you experience in dreaming is merely a figment of your own imagination, or that everyone you encounter is a projection or aspect of yourself.
     You will come to understand that dreaming – lucid or otherwise – is a portal to other realms of reality in the multidimensional universe. They may have their own physics, whether similar or wildly different from the physics of everyday experience on Earth.  These realms include the territories where the dead are alive.
     This is common knowledge in ancestral and indigenous traditions, which understand that the dream world is a real world and may actually be more real than much of ordinary life, where we are sometimes in the condition of sleepwalkers. In dreaming cultures, it is recognized that the most important events in our lives may take place in dreams.              
     Anthropologist Irving Hallowell wrote of the Ojibwa, “When we think autobiographically we only include events that happened to us when awake; the Ojubwa include remembered events that hat have occurred in dreams. And, far from being of subordinate importance, such experiences are for them often of more vital importance than the events of daily waking life. Why is this so? Because it is in dreams that the individual comes into direct communication with the atiso’kanak, the powerful ‘persons’ of the other-than-human class.”[2]

     Shamans say that in dreams that matter (waking or sleeping) one of two things is happening. Either you are journeying beyond your body, released from the limits of space-time and the physical senses; or you receive a visitation from a being — god, spirit, or fellow dreamer — who does not suffer from these limitations. In the language of the Makiritare, a dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for dream, adekato, means literally a “flight of the soul.”[3]
     Among the Semang-Negrito peoples of the Malay peninsula, "walking into a dream" means entering an altered state of consciousness and a separate reality.  What is experienced in dreams is at least as real as what goes on in the day. One of the souls of the dreamer travels in other worlds. [4]

    If you have been primed to think that what goes on in dreams is all about your  own thoughts and projections, you may be shocked into awareness that the dream world is a real world when you find yourself in a lucid dream in which other players are clearly beyond your control. 
    For Jung, the dawning came in his encounters with the mentor he called Philemon, who appeared to him as an old man with kingfisher blue wings and convinced the psychologist, as Jung put it, of the objective reality of figures who appear in inner experiences. "it was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche." [5]
    I once dreamed that I was rattling along at high speed in a yellow New York City cab. I became lucid when I noticed that the taxi driver was a dead man yoked to the steering wheel by a rope around his neck. I yelled for the cab to stop. When it did, I heard the kind of recorded voice you get in New York cabs. It said, "This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife."
    I proceeded to have adventures in a number of strange Underworld locales and bardo states. Getting out of here was not straightforward. I had to ask for help. It came in the elegant shape of a being I had met many times before, who is recognized in certain traditions as a form of the sacred Gatekeeper. I was lucid throughout this odyssey, and volitional in the sense that I remained fully conscious of my power to choose my course. But the other players and the environment itself had their own reality and solidity.
     A bigger experience in a state of dream lucidity brought me to my first encounter with the spiritual teacher I have called Island Woman in my books. This episode began in the hypnopompic zone, when I stirred from sleep in the middle of the night. Among the stream of images rising on my inner screen, I chose a double spiral of the kind I had seen on a guardian stone at the entrance to Newgrange, the megalithic temple-tomb in Ireland.
     Instantly, I found myself floating above my body - a reminder that in dreaming (lucid or not) we often travel beyond the body and brain. I enjoyed the very sensory experience of flight. I lifted over trees and rooftops, soaring and swooping like a bird. I felt some pain when my wingfeathers rubbed the dried needles of an old spruce tree.

     Then I felt the tug of someone else's intention. I chose to follow the call. It brought me on a long flight over pristine woodlands - modern highways and developments were gone - to a cabin somewhere near Montreal where a wise and ancient woman spoke to me over a wampum belt. I did not understand her language until a series of later experiences - and some helpful synchronicity - led me to my first friends among the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois. They had me repeat words I had recorded phonetically. Eventually we determined that my interlocutor was speaking to me in an archaic form of the Mohawk language, "the way we may have spoken it three hundred years ago."
     I was required to study Mohawk to understand the teachings of an arendiwanen, or "woman of power", who had called me in a lucid dream into a real world beyond linear space and time. This transformed my life. [6]
    
References

1. Roger Ivar Lohmann and Shayne A.P. Dahl, "Cultural Contingency and the Varieties of Lucid Dreaming" in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds) Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014) vol 2., 24-25.
2. A. Irving Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View" in Stanley Diamond (ed) Culture and History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 207-44.
3. Marc de Civrieux, "Medatia: A Makiritare Shaman's Tale" in David M. Guss (ed) The Language of the Birds (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985) 74.
4. Diana Riboli, "Dreamed Violence and Shamanic Transformation in Indigenous Nepal and Malaysia" in Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives, vol, 2, 75.
5. C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage, 1973) 183.
6. For the full story, see Robert Moss, Dreamways of the Iroquois (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (Novato CA: New World Library, 2014).

Photo by RM
Drawing: "Island Woman" by Robert Moss

Reality, Illusion and the Rupture of Time in Eliade's Strange Tales

Mircea Eliade is best known in English as a historian of religion, but he was also a prolific author of fiction and fantasy. He regarded the long novel published in English as The Forbidden Forest as his chef d'oeuvre, but many readers will find its loops and repetitions wearisome. However, his shorter fiction can be captivating while evoking some of Eliade's favorite philosophic themes: how the sacred is "camouflaged" in the profane, how at any turning we may encounter a moment of theophany, when the divine irrupts into everyday life and we are released from limits of time and space.
     I have been rereading the stories published in translation as Two Strange Tales. Perhaps we should call stories like this nonfiction fantasy rather than fiction. In "Nights in Serampore", Eliade makes himself a lead character. He assigns roles to actual people under their real names, in this case well-known people he encountered in India: the Russian (Eastern Orthodox) scholar of Islam Bogdanov, the Dutch Secretary of the Asia Society, van Manen, and Swami Sivananda (“Shivananda” in this version). The two Westerners, with the narrator (Eliade himself) are in the habit of driving to a rich man’s house in the woods near Serampore, sixteen miles from Calcutta, for long nights of talking, smoking and drinking in a lovely setting, in the perfumed air.

    A mystery develops. A Hindu professor reputed to be a master of tantra and yogic siddhis is seen on the road in his dhoti with the saffron stripes on his forehead. Questioned later, he denies having been there. He is spotted again, after Eliade has been discoursing on “awful” methods used to acquire occult powers in Hindu tradition, like meditating all night while seated on a corpse. That evening, as the threesome leave the rich man’s house, something strange happens during the car ride. It is taking far longer than it should to get to the highway, the trees are getting bigger and bigger. Eliade closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them the jungle is wild and unfamiliar.
     They hear a woman’s screams. They get out of the car and follow a flickering light through the jungle. It brings them to charcoal burners, and an old, rather grand house. The owner receives them, but moves and speaks very slowly, using only an archaic form of Bengali. The visitors are confused. They forget the screams that brought them here. Then they remember something, and start to ask questions. The owner of the house informs them that they heard the screams of his wife as she was stabbed to death. Look, here is her body, being carried in on a bier.
    Eliade and his friends leave in discomfort and confusion. They can hardly stay when the lady of the house has just been murdered. Weary and drained, they pause under a tree where Eliade takes a nap. Eventually they find their way back to the car. The driver acts as though they never left. Confounded, Eliade and his companions retrace their steps. They return to the tree where Eliade took a nap. They see their footprints on the ground and follow them. They come to a clearing where the signs of their passage end. There is no grand house, no charcoal burners, no murdered woman being prepared for cremation.
    They learn that there was a great house at this place, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago, before it was burned to the ground. The case of the murdered woman, whose name was Lila, was notorious. She died resisting men who were trying to abduct her. It seems that Eliade and his friends were transported across time. Their adventure was not only metaphysical, since it produced physical effects – their torn and dirtied clothes, their footprints on the ground.
     When they seek to make sense of this, their suspicions fall on Suren Bose, the yogi magician. Could he have worked an enchantment, to distract them from spying on whatever he was doing in the forest? How could this be?
     Eliade’s question remains unanswered until he goes to a monastery in the Himalayas and tells his story to Swami Sivananda. The swami explains: “No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that exists in this universe is illusory. Not only the death of Lila and her husband’s grief, but also the encounter between you, living men, and their shades – all these things are illusory. And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own – whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes. Obviously he doesn’t create anything real either, but only a play of appearances.”
   When Eliade struggles with this, Sivananda stages a demonstration. The swami squeezes Eliade's arm and drags him along. Eliade staggers. Hi senses blur. Now he seems to be in a different time and place, back in the humid forest of the south. Sivananda makes him walk faster. He is again at the charcoal kilns, at the big house in the forest. “Wake me up!” Eliade pleads.

In his introduction to Two Strange Tales, Eliade discusses the importance of fiction in his work. Both stories turn on the use of supposed yogic techniques to wield occult powers. The mélange of reality and fiction in these stories, he observes, is well-suited to his concept of “camouflage”, of how the sacred is concealed in the profane. He writes that

in these two stories “camouflage” is used in a paradoxical manner, for the reader has no means to know whether the “reality” is hidden in “fiction” or the other way round, because both processes are intermingled. 

     A favorite technique of mine aims at the imperceptible yet gradual transmutation of a commonplace setting into a new “world’, without however losing its proper, everyday or “natural” structure and qualities...The parallel world of the fantastic is indistinguishable from the given ordinary world, but once this other world is discovered by the various characters it blurs, changes, transforms or dislocates their lives in different ways. 

      Each tale creates its own proper universe, and the creation of such imaginary universes through literary means can be compared with mythical processes...The imaginary universes brought to light in littérature fantastique disclose some elements of reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches.

    The second story, "The Secret of Dr. Honigberger", involves another real person, a colorful German-Romanian from Brasov. The narrator (Eliade himself) receives an invitation from a Mrs Zerlendi to inspect her husband’s Oriental collection. He arrives at the kind of house that often features in Eliade’s fantastic tales, “one of those houses that I never can pass without pausing for a closer look”, an old villa behind an ironwork fence and an overgrown garden with a dried-up pool, where a world disappearing from other parts of the city is strangely preserved. The main entrance is protected by a sunroof of frosted glass, of the kind that struck me when I visited Eliade’s old neighborhood in Bucharest, on a street near Mantuleasa.

      Eliade is seduced by an immense library of 30,000 books. We learn that Mr. Zerlendi was doing research for a biography of Honigberger, a German-Romanian from Brasov who became famous for his adventures in the East. However, Zerlendi disappeared many years before. Going through Zerlendi’s notebook, Eliade finds clues to what happened. Among all his composition books, Zerlendi left a journal written in Sanskrit, correctly assuming that it would take a rarely qualified investigator to recognize and interpret its contents. In this journal he recorded his experiments with yogic techniques, including the art of invisibility.
     Central to his practice was the kind of dream yoga or lucid dreaming that places high value of maintaining continuity of consciousness between waking, dreaming and other states.

After some time I woke up sleeping, or, more precisely, I woke up in sleep, without ever having fallen asleep in the true sense of the word. My body and all my senses sunk into deeper and deeper sleep, but my mind didn’t interrupt its activity for a single instant...

     I was astounded to behold, with my eyelids closed, the very same scene as I had with my eyes open…I saw in any direction I wanted to, I saw wherever I turned my thoughts, whether or not I had my eyes open. 

He sees others moving in their dream bodies.

The unification of consciousness is attained by means of a continuous transition, that is, one without a hiatus of any sort, from the waking state to the state of dreaming sleep, then to that of dreamless sleep, and finally to the cataleptic state. 

Eliade comments: “All the Indian ascetics that I have known who have consented to give me any explanations regarded this stage, the unification of the states of consciousness, as the most important of all. Anyone who did not succeed in experiencing this could never derive any spiritual benefit from following yoga practice.” 

     Dr Zerlendi applied himself to placing himself in cataleptic trance for longer and longer periods. He believed he had proved that he stepped outside time when he rose after 36 hours to find his face as freshly shaven as when he lay down. He laid in suspended animation for 12 hours without drawing breath. He declared, in his secret book, “I know the way to Shambhala. I know how to get there.”

     He made it his aim to transport himself to Shambhala. To do this he would have to step outside time. He practiced the art of invisibility as a step towards gaining the power of teleportation, de-materializing in one reality in order to re-materialize in another.
     Seized with excitement, Eliade smuggles the journal out of the house, in order to study Zerlendi's techniques closely. He will return the book covertly before anyone notices it is missing.
    There is a slight problem. When Eliade returns to the house to interview Mrs Zerlendi again. When he succeeds, nobody remembers him. He protests that he was working in the library for two full months. This is quite impossible, they tell him. There is no library in the house. There used to be one, but it was broken up and sold off twenty years before.
   Eliade goes to the house again, hoping that it will be as he first found it. Now the whole scene is falling apart, like a broken dream. The Zerlendi house is being pulled down.
    My favorite passage in the story: "I have always divided people into two categories: those who understand death as an end to life and the body, and those who conceive it as the beginning of a new, spiritual existence. And I never form an opinion of any man I meet until I have learned his honest belief about death." 

Nonfiction fantasy. I like the genre description I just invented. In Eliade's case, it not only means that he gives himself permission to use the identities and circumstances of "real" people, starting with himself. It means that the stories are derived from experiences in realities beyond the physical that may be no less real and sometimes intersect - magically or catastrophically -with the world of the senses. 


Quotations are from Two Strange Tales by Mircea Eliade, published (appropriately) by Shambhala (Boston, 1986). The translation is credited to Herder & Herder.

Art: "Nights in Serampore" by Christian Bode (2016)

Growing Dream Bubbles in the Many Worlds

 I learn so much from my parallel selves, in dreams, in shamanic journeys,and in encounters in the liminal space between sleep and awake. I admire the writer Roberts who are highly accomplished in different genres, and the artist Robert who does great work in oils. I follow in the footsteps of the Roberts who are ahead of me on my present path, teaching things I have just started to master. I draw comfort from observing the plight of parallel Roberts who made choices that led to blighted relationships, illness or creative sterility.
    The parallel Roberts who intrigue me most are ones who are living full-time in the imaginal realm. It is likely they are Roberts who left the physical world before me. There is nothing surprising in that idea. If the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics is correct, and we are living right now in one of innumerable parallel worlds, then numberless versions of ourselves died before us, at birth or in childhood, through a heart attack or the virus or self-destruction, in easy or difficult ways.
     I love to check on the lifestyles, living arrangements and activities of my Roberts on the Other Side. I admire the residence of the Penthouse Robert who swims in an infinity pool in his rooftop terrace and then dives twenty stories down, like a sea bird, to swim in a turquoise bay. I am thrilled by the access of the scholar Roberts to a Total Library where they bring together knowledge from many realms. I am humbled by the service of the psychopomp Roberts who are devoted to helping people on both sides of death to find and follow their rightful soul paths. 
     I enjoy Robert the Literary Angel who loves to play muse to writers in the physical world, beaming them material that leaps effortlessly on to their pages. He enjoys seeing his ideas take form without having to tap them out on a keyboard and - amazingly - seems to take not pride in the assertion of authorship. Being in his mind gives me an inkling of why guardian angels do what they do. I try not to talk about him in my creative writing retreats because participants start looking at me hungrily, as if willing me to check out soon and start beaming new books to them. 
     I made a shamanic journey to visit a parallel Roberts who is one of the full-time residents of a School of Soul on the Other Side. I was delighted by his studies and his books, include many I have not yet written or published here below. It struck me that I had never consciously visited his bedroom. Does he even have one? After all, he 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 little terrace 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, utterly alive. I played with floating in the waters of a wonderful sea cave, enjoying the scene with all of my senses. And then of enjoying the vibrant life of a great city where the arts are cherished. The scene grew until it became a whole world.
     I was reminded by this visit that there is a way of dreaming that is the inverse of receiving images from without and also quite different from making an excursion.. It is 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.

RM journal drawing: "Dream Box"

   

The afterdeath journal of an American philosopher

The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher is  Jane Roberts’ version of the afterlife reflections of the great American philosopher and pioneer of psychology William James. Jane Roberts, an excellent writer and thinker in her own right, became famous for channeling the "interdimensional teacher" known as Seth. Seth was unknown to the public before Jane started publishing the Seth material but was quickly recognized as an extraordinary guide to the multidimensional self and to dreaming as the best way to explore the multiverse and practice reality creation.
    Here we find Jane in contact with a mind that influenced many in this world before it left the body. Like other luminaries of the Society for psychical Research, William James was keenly interested in assembling scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death. Like his British associates F.W.H. Myers and W.T. Stead, he let it be known that after he took up residence on the Other Side. he would seek to report back, via sensitives, on what he had discovered. What better scientific data on survival could there be than first-hand reports from the afterlife from towering and trustworthy intellects like his own?
    I have deep appreciation for what came through from Stead (The Blue Island) and Myers (The Road to Immortality).  The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher has less geography and fewer road maps. It was transcribed  69 years after the death of the supposed communicator in 1910. However, it is a wonderfully plausible account of a desirable afterlife environment, especially interesting on what persuades the dead to take a lively interest in the living.

     Can we believe that the voice is really that of William James? We are told, “I am the William James that I was but I am no longer William James in the same way that he adult is not the child.” He says he is more “lively” now than he was in life, when he was prone to deep depression.
     His role has changed. He is no longer an investigator of psychic phenomena but an ideal case study for later investigators. “I have turned from being an investigator of ‘strange sources’ into a perfect instance of the kind of phenomena that in life I would have tracked down.” 

     Looking back over the life he left behind, he says that had he known what he now knows: “I would have sought more ambitiously for proof of the soul’s existence in life rather than seeking for evidence of its afterdeath existence through communications from the dead. The soul’s abilities in life, clearly defined , would in life show themselves to be independent of the body’s physical confinements. Therefore I would have looked even more vigorously for accelerations and extensions of the creative abilities as they appear in telepathy, clairvoyance, healings and out of body travel, and I would have examined those characteristics of mind (or soul) that display mind’s control of matter” 

    He tries to describe how the mind generates the reality we inhabit often without recognizing what is going on. “The private cast of consciousness works upon the objective world landscape by giving it its final, private, definite form; as if before the individual perceives objects, here is instead a field of pliable, malleable, pseudoshapes. The perceptions themselves bring these into focus and form…The processes are so smooth and automatic, so beautifully executed, that man rarely catches himself in the act of this multiple creativity, as the mind forms the world pattern of objects and events.”
    Active dreamers will be encouraged by the suggestion that dreams may be test patterns, rehearsals for physical events that will follow. “Dream images and imaginative acts prepare the way for physical ones, impressing large areas in general preshapes which are later ‘filled in’. It is as if the mind makes preliminary test patterns that are projections in space-time, but in a ghostly fashion. These dream images, however, are laid upon initial fields of probabilities which are characteristic of the physical medium itself.”
    One thing the philosopher reporting from the afterlife can confirm for sure: "lifelines begin before birth and continue after it."

For more on the adventures of the great Victorian "ghost hunters" before and after death, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead.

Seth and the Dream Department of Literary Production

I love first-hand stories of how writers are inspired and spurred to action by dreams. In an old journal, I found notes I made while reading Susan M. Watkins' account of the classes she took with Jane Roberts and Seth in the early 1970s. She reported that a dream pushed her to jettison her doubts about turning her journals into a book. She dreamed she saw a print shop growing out of her backyard garage, “literally growing, like a time-lapse garden film – out of the garage walls and floor”. She knew this print shop contained everything she needed to produce her book and get it circulating to an audience.
    She proceeded to put together and publish her book, Conversations with Seth, a treasury for those of us who are drawn to the Seth material and its wonderfully clear description of multidimensional reality and the multidimensional self and the vital importance of dreaming in all of this.

    Susan compared the mobilizing effect of this dream to the kind of experience described by Jane Roberts in Adventures in Consciousness, when a surge of creative energy is given to us by the psyche at exactly the right moment.
    As a writer myself, I assign such episodes (devoutly to be wished) to the Dream Department of Literary Production.

My rediscovery of the Watkins story made me open her book again, at random. I found precious thoughts from Seth on two very important themes: how absence of dream recall may be caused by fear of the inner self, and how the dream world s not only a real world but may be the source of events in the physical world.

    In a session of Jane Roberts class in June 1973 Seth had this to say to a participant who wanted to know why, if dreams are important, she could not remember hers:

    “You are still afraid of the inner self. You still do not trust your dreams, and you are afraid of them. You do not want to remember them. When you give yourselves the suggestion that you will remember your dreams…you do not mean it. You are afraid or what you might meet, and you are still afraid of one particular dream, and you know the one to which I am referring.

     “You can change the ending of the dream by understanding the nature of reality: that you form it….You must believe in the power and energy and strength and glory of your being, and know that problems are challenges for you to solve…Then face them joyfully [with] your entire self….

    “Stop cowering! Do not cower before your own belief that the inner self is frightening, or that you are a bad person, or that while you are good, there are bad things hidden down there. Tell yourself, and convince yourself, that since you area part of All That Is, you are in your own way, now, a unique expression of All That Is, and there is nothing in All That Is to be afraid of and there  is nothing in you to be afraid of.”

     Later in that session Seth comes to his favorite theme:

    “How real is a dream? What makes you think that there is any difference between what you think of as a dream and what you think of as reality? You assume that a dream is less real; yet through what you think of as your dreaming life, you make your physical life…You choose in the dream state the probable realities that you will then make physical.”

The inner psychic combustion that gave us a great multidimensional teacher

There is one God, but within that God are many. There is one self, but within that self are many. There is one body, in one time, but the self has other bodies in other times. All “times” exist at once.

The voice is that of Seth, the "energy personality essence" channeled by Jane Roberts. We are near the beginning of the third of the Seth books, titled The "Unknown" Reality. I see from my note on the flyleaf that I purchased this book on 8.8.88.
    I came to the Seth materials reluctantly, even after I moved to upstate New York, not so far from where Jane Roberts had lived and practiced (in the Saratoga area and later in Elmira). I was wary around psychic mediums, perhaps because my great-aunt, the opera singer, had foreseen my death in the tea leaves when I was three years old. She was entirely accurate, by the way; in the words of a doctor in a hospital in the winter that followed, I was a boy who died and came back.
    Then, too, I winced at the slovenly or overly portentous verbiage of much of the channeled material that had come to my attention. Much of it seemed quite lacking in humor or wordcraft.
    It took an intervention to get me to start reading the Seth books. The intervention came embodied by a lively, intelligent woman from Caracas named Romelia. I had met her the previous year in Brazil, where we had investigated the mixology of caipirinhas. On a visit to New York, she called me at the farm to which I had recently moved. Naturally, I invited her to visit. At the end of the long drive to the farm house, she could not wait to cross my threshold before she shouted, "Robert, you must read Jane Roberts!"
    And I did, and I did. I started with Seth Speaks. I was stunned. Here was the clearest model I had so far found for the nature of the self and the conditions for reality creation in the multiverse. I could have done without all the interruptions to the text (as we are told that Jane paused to smoke a cigarette, for example) but nonetheless the voice came through, bold and clear. 

Who is Seth? In describing himself, he prefers not to use the word “spirit”. He jokes that he is a “ghost writer”. He says, “I am an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter...     To write this book…I adopt from my own bank of past personalities those characteristics that seem most appropriate.” He can communicate through Jane Roberts because she is a "window". Within her psyche is “what amounts to a transparent dimensional warp that serves almost like an open window through which other realities can be perceived.”

    Where is Seth based? Not in what we think of as the afterlife. “You must die many times before you enter into this particular plane of existence.”

    The plot thickens when Seth starts speaking of an entity called, for convenience, Seth Two, a personality operating on a level above his. Jane Roberts speculates  that “Seth may be as much of a creation as his book is.” A form of the Speaker generated by a multidimensional intelligence to communicate in her time, and ours.
     As a former journalist, I am trained and disposed to check on the reliability of any source. But the true test for a source of this kind is the quality of the material that comes through. And the Seth material is extraordinary. 

    Seth is one of the really great dream educators. He is crystal clear about the important things that go on in dreaming. Consciousness travels outside the body, every night, in dreams. Dreaming, we travel to other realities, no less real (maybe more so) than the physical world.  Dreaming, we choose from an infinity of probable events those which will become physical. As we become conscious dreamers, we can not only shape reality on other planes, but can engage in reality creation on the physical plane. Thus:

“You can learn to change your physical environment by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment.” 

“Each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states” 

“This sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.” 

“As there is continuity in your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life...Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your waking life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned. You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams.” 

Before long I was dreaming my own version of Seth. He looked like a knobby Dutch or Scandinavian publican, who might have spent time at sea, and I drew him looking like that. Years later, when I saw a picture of Seth by Jane Roberts’ husband Rob Butts, I was struck by the strong resemblance.

     I became content to respond to the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts according to its inherent quality, without asking many questions about the source.
     As I listen to Seth again, I am again thrilled by the simplicity and vital importance of his key statements. Re-read the one that opens this post. This goes to the heart of what it means to be a conscious citizen of the multiverse.
     I was interested to find a detailed account by Jane Roberts in a 1976 essay of what it was like to be speaker for The "Unknown" Reality. She described the book as the product of “an inner psychic ‘combustion’ – the spark that is lit in our world, as Seth’s reality strikes mine – or vice versa." She said that in her trance of transmission she entered "a higher state of wakefulness rather than the sleep usually associated with trance – but a different kind of wakefulness, in which the usual world seems to be sleeping.” This type of trance brought "a feeling of inexhaustible energy, emotional wholeness, and subjective freedom.” In a striking attempt to define her relationship with Seth, she added, “I think I’m alive in Seth’s subjective ‘body’ in the same way that one of my cells is alive in my physical body.” 

Portrait of Seth by Robert F. Butts
    

From Meister Eckhart, a secret of time travel and reality creation

When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.

The words are from Meister Eckhart, the medieval German theologian and mystic who knew about the laws of the larger reality through direct experience. I first read then and jotted them down as an undergraduate, eons ago. They turn up now and then unexpectedly, as they did just now in an old journal. I went looking just now for the exact source (the history professor in me dies hard) and I see that you can order a Meister Eckhart Quote Bag with this inscription.
     I'm tickled by the notion that instead of putting this quote in your bag of tricks, you might want to try packing what you carry through the day inside the thought.
     It's a thought that demands walking meditation. Travel with it, and see how it shapes and illuminates your day. Then test it against your dreams.
     The medieval master is telling us something vitally important about our relationship with time. He explains, for starters, how it is that we can see the future, especially in dreams. Consciousness - call it soul - is never confined to the body, or to linear time, except by our confining belief systems. The shared belief of most, if not all, ancient and indigenous cultures is that soul gets around, especially in dreams. It visits places distant from us in space and time. It finds itself at home in nonlocal mind (to use a contemporary expression).
     Meister Eckhart is prompting us to go even deeper. He is hinting at a secret of manifestation. He draws us to think about the confluence between what medieval theologians called the Aevum - the realm between time and eternity - and events in our world. It is in the Aevum that the incidents and circumstances of our physical lives are generated, in this understanding, through the agency of imagination, that great faculty of soul. On most days, most of us, sequestered from soul and its knowing, are merely receivers of the results of choices made in this realm that is hidden from the ordinary mind.

Who knew where we stood? 
In an aevum maybe, where time's conferred
with the beginning we gave it,
but with no end in sight.

These beckoning lines are from a poem titled "Aevum" by M.E.Caballero-Robb. They strengthen the enjoinder to walk through a day - why not today? - with Meister Eckhart's thought. That means asking, of whatever develops during the day, What image am I now entering? And, Where and how was this image created?
     Then, energized by these reflections, we go the long step further, which is to seek to be present, as conscious co-creators, in the place where soul makes its choices on what we - as its vehicles - will experience in the world.
     Do I sound like a mystic? Very well, you may call me a mystic, but I would say that I am a mystic of a very practical order. We are talking about how worlds are made.
     By the way, a more famous Meister Eckhart quote is this: "If the only prayer you said in your life was Thank You, that would suffice." That is my own philosophy of prayer, and it is the practice of people who live close to the Earth as well as the heavens, and give thanks daily for its gifts. Oh yes, you can get that on a "quote bag" too.

I had a dream

I had a dream, you say,
but maybe a dream had you.
A dream may slip through the keyhole
and stand over your head, whispering,
or creep under the covers with you.

You could say that you saw a dream
or you heard one. On juicy nights
you might taste a dream and wake
with the tang of raspberries
or runny cheese on your mouth.

Dreams may be visitors.
Dreams are also places you visit
where your experiences may be
realer than what you call real
on an ordinary day.

When you wake up to what’s going on
you know you don’t have to lie down
and let just any dream have you.
You don’t need to keep going
to bad neighborhoods in the dreamlands.

You can make better dreams.
You have a starship full of dream producers
waiting for your call. Dump your old scripts
and they’ll help you create worlds.
Then you’ll have a dream.

- August 24, 2014

Art: "Making Songlines" (c) Robert Moss

What are you doing?

Madison, Wisconsin

"What are you doing?"
     A woman in my Madison workshop told me she hears this question, put by an inner voice, many times a day. Sometimes it rattles her and saps her confidence. But she readily agreed that this may be a salutary question for us to put to ourselves, in the midst of any activity, or inactivity.
    It helps us to see our situation from the standpoint of an observer.
    What we look at what we are doing or not doing from this perspective, we are able to get a clearer view of what use we are making of our time and energy and our skills. Most important, we may now be able to recognize what we are attracting or driving away through our behavior and even our thoughts.
     This has to do with the law of attraction (though I can hardly use that phase since the travesty of The Secret), which I sometimes like to call spiritual magnetism. We draw different events and energies towards us, or send them away, according to our actions and our intentions. With our thoughts and fantasies, even before action, we grow dreams of life, and then walk into those dreams in the physical world. What we feed our minds and our bodies attracts or repels different parts of ourselves as well as different classes of spirits.
     I have noticed in my own life as a writer that when I am seeking to create something new, and taking the risks involved, I draw the interest of greater powers. More of my own creative spirit becomes engaged, lending me abilities beyond those I possess when I am doing something small and safe or quite absent from the larger venture. I notice this as a teacher and healer. When I am willing to give more to others, to do my very best to bring the light or spirit into their eyes or to wrap them in the healing embrace of Great Mother Bear, I draw powers far beyond my ordinary self – and now it can be very important to let the ordinary self stand aside while a Greater Self operates.
      I don’t want to sound too solemn about all of this. I find I do much better, and that those around me feel better too, when I approach life’s assignments in a spirit of play.
     What are you doing? says that persistent inner voice.
     I’m having a little fun, playing with an old and ever renewing idea. Glad you asked.

Image: "Dream Path II" by Dorothy Englander.

Barcelona journal: Building a City of Life and Death

Barcelona, Spain

On Wednesday morning, after the Battle of the Barbican, I walked in the sun and took the metro to see Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. In the park opposite this amazing pile, I met a headless man, impeccably dressed. He came alive enough to whistle for a tip when I took his picture. Keeping one’s head can be quite a trick in Barcelona, but there are those who manage to get by without one.
      In the afternoon, I was buried alive. 

I have been buried alive. I agreed for this to be done as some kind of experiment that I myself may have initiated. I am lying now in a coffin-sized chamber of hardened earth. I tap on the roof above me when I decide I've been in here long enough. No one responds. Can they really not hear me? The earth above me is only a few inches thick. I am going to cry out, nervous now. Instead, I find a way to get myself out, maybe just by pushing really hard.

I woke feeling cheerful, even triumphant, and greatly restored in my body. I smiled at the mirror function of the dream. I recognize that I have a tendency to get myself into some holes without checking how to get out!

For most of the night that followed, in the default reality of my dreaming mind, I am writing while listening to an inner voice narrating the kind of book you can live inside. As the narrative goes on, and I continue to create in concert with my inner voice, a great city takes form all around me, its architecture stranger than Gaudi's.
     In this City of Life and Death, travelers step back and forth easily between different dimensions. There are doors through which veteran travelers can step back and forth between life and death, whenever they like. There are clothing stores with impossible price tags, or no prices at all, where those who make an arrangement with a private shopper can change into different bodies as easily as regular people change clothes.Like the living statues of Barcelona, they can shift without warning from suspended animation to elegant acrobatics.

Dreamers build cities without engineers

Marge Nelk, "Possible Worlds"

I am interested in how worlds are made. Dreaming, we are constantly present at the creation of cities, pleasure palaces and freak shows. Consciously or unconsciously, our dreams may become the building blocks of worlds that will outlive what made them.  We design our homes in the afterlife from these materials.

     To grasp the mechanics of this kind of reality construction, we need poetic consciousness. Let's start with an excerpt from a poem titled "Dreams" by the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. 

Dreams

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains

with perfect infrastructures.

Without engineers, contractors, workers,

bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—

raging highways, instant bridges,

thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—

crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us

and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,

without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—

on the path a sudden house just like a toy,

and in it vast halls that echo with our steps

and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—

a specific watch, an entire fly,

on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,

a bitten apple with teeth marks.

-  The complete version of this poem by the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, appeared in the September 2010 issue of Poetry magazine

A universe inside a stone

I am intrigued by tales in which we find a universe inside a very small space, such as the space between subatomic particles. These give us a window into what physics is telling us about the nature of hidden dimensions, and they provide a context of understanding for dreams and visions in which we experience these realities directly.

In the vast Yogavasistha the sage Vasistha entertains and instructs the despondent Rama with a series of tales that include his first-hand account of his travel to and from a world of beauty and magic that he created in subatomic space.

At a certain time in his life, the sage recalled, he wished to leave the “busy world” behind and live in a quiet place “free from all imaginings, where I would be invisible to everyone.” Through “yoga and imagination” he created a little hut in a “far-distant corner of the space of emptiness” and lived there unmoving, in the lotus posture, meditating. A century passed in a flash.

In my meditation I saw the thousands of universes that are nested one within another, even inside the smallest atom of a stone.

He surfaced from meditation and heard the beautiful voice of a woman. He searched for her. “I went into the space of my mind and saw countless worlds, all unable to see one another.” After many years, he heard the sound of a lute, and followed to a beautiful young woman singing sweetly. She was a celestial magician [vidyadhari]. Vasistha wanted to know how she came to be here.

She told him her home was inside a tiny atom of a stone in a peak of the mountain called Lokaloka (World-Not-World) “which encircles the disks of the worlds on the outer rim of the universe”. She was the wife of an ascetic scholar who created her from his imagination but never consummated their marriage, because he was wholly given to his studies and meditation. As “the most beautiful woman in the world” she was frustrated. She flew to the sage to seek release for both of them.

She invited Vasistha to visit her world, and by magic, made it possible for him to fly with her to it. At the border of her realm, the sage could at first see nothing. She told him this was because he had become too remote from the worlds of manifestation. In order to see her “illusory” world of forms, he must recall his life experiences from before the time when he achieved full enlightenment. Vasistha went into trance and saw “as in a dream, a great stone and a whole universe inside it.”

In the world inside the stone, Vasistha met its creator. The creator opened his eyes and told him: “As you are to me, so I am to you; this is a mutual story. For a man who is dreaming becomes a man in another man’s dream.” The beautiful woman created an illusory world out of her own desires; now it would end. He withdrew his mind from external images, and the world collapsed in fire and flood, into stillness.

Vasistha looked at the stone again, “like a country boy standing at the door of a palace”:

Everywhere I looked, in every single atom of it, I saw a whole universe. Each of these worlds was different from the other; some had a few resemblances, some more, some no resemblance at all. Some were made entirely of rock, some of water, some of air. In one of them I saw Rama killing Ravana, and in another I saw Rama being defeated by Ravana. Then I understood that all of these worlds were the ideas of various people. Each person imagines his own world, and that becomes his world.

He went back to meditation in his hut in the corner of emptiness. His body was gone. In its place was a magician [siddha] seated in meditation.

Vasistha decided to stop imagining this place. As his mind fell “from the sky to the earth” the magician dropped from the hut that had ceased to exist, still in meditation, falling like a stone. Vasistha roused him with some difficulty, using rain and thunder and hail. They swapped life stories, become friends, and agreed to live together in a world of the magicians where each eventually found a congenial home.

Much to dream and reflect on here! We see how worlds are made by imagination and how what is conceived in the imagination takes on its own life. Vasistha creates a beautiful woman in a trance, and then she comes to him when he has emerged from his trance.

It seems that others can live in our self-created worlds. While some mental worlds ceased to exist when we cease to imagine them, others continue. The people we dream are dreaming about us. We have interesting doubles in the multiverse.

The incredibly large can be found within the incredibly small.

Parallel worlds coexist at every level of the cosmos.

Source: Yogavasistha 6.2.56-94. There is an elegant summary in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty's Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities.

Two ways of re-making the future

I am teaching two ways of re-making the future. One involves working with what looks like a ball of string. The second way involves scooping, molding and sculpting a heap of soft material, like dough or squishy clay.

I have announced that a prize will be given for the best student in each category. The bigger prize will go to the one who sculpts from the formless mass of pliable "dough".

The students are eager to try this assignment. As they take turns to separate strings from the ball, I notice that the strings look a bit like long strips of celluloid, as were used to record and project films. A vigorous, stocky man throws himself into molding and sculpting the heap of soft matter. He's building an amazing structure and he's the clear favorite to win the prize I have announced.

Feelings: Actively curious and intrigued.

Reality: I teach people to play with the idea that we can switch from one probable event track, running into the future, to another. This can be visualized as selecting one string of events from a ball of possibilities. I also like the idea that we can "rewind" a certain sequence - in life as in dreams - back to a certain point of decision, and then go forward with a different scenario.

I also love the image of sculpting a life project out of a soft mass of unformed material. The prize is no doubt bigger here because there is more creating to be done. I think of how, in the imaginal realm, we can build cities and palaces of subtle and ideoplastic substance. It could be contended that it is from creation on this plane that physical structures and situations are manifested.

Tunnel of Light by Eve Fouquet