Through the Dream Gates to Initiation

 

True initiation involves both ordeal and ecstasy, death and rebirth.. “The majority of initiatory ordeals more or less clearly imply a ritual death followed by resurrection or a new birth,” commented the great religious historian Mircea Eliade. “The novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.”[1] The initiate is a made man or woman.

The hunger for transcendence, through a primal, direct encounter with the sacred, leads people down strange and dangerous byways: into experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, into dubious cults and ersatz Nativism. Yet the authentic call to initiation continues to resonate in our dreams. And through the dream gates, it can be followed to a genuine consummation. Arguably, it can hardly be pursued in any other way since — whatever the externals of ceremony and culture — true spiritual initiation and apprenticeship always take place on the inner planes, in a deeper order of reality.

Even in societies where Mystery initiation was regarded as central to human fulfillment, and its gates and secrets closely guarded, the validity of an individual dream calling and initiation was honored. There is a fascinating story about this from the Hellenistic world, preserved by Sopatros, a teacher of rhetoric. A man dreamed he had attended the epopteia, the crowning revelation of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He recounted the secret rituals of the Telesterion in vivid and accurate detail to an initiate of the Greater Mysteries. But in ordinary reality, the dreamer was not a “made man.” 

The initiate to whom he told his dream was shocked that he was speaking openly about things he had no right to know and denounced him for sacrilege. He was dragged into court, where his accusers demanded the death penalty. However, the defense argued successfully that the gods themselves had played a part of the hierophant in his dream. His dream of initiation was recognized as true initiation; the dreamer would now be respected as an epoptes — one who had “seen” and gone through the sacred fire.[2]

Contemporary dreamers who have never heard of Eleusis have dreams of the same quality.

At the winter solstice, just after her twelfth birthday, Rebecca had a powerful dream that carried her deep into the Otherworld. In her dream, she was invited to enter an immense hall. It was filled with robed figures she described as “wizards.” They came from many races and traditions; she recognized a “Merlin” character among a Celtic contingent. 

A woman robed in white sat enthroned above the throng. She beckoned to Rebecca to approach her. The male wizards ignored Rebecca except for the forbidding figure who moved to block her path. He challenged her to pass a test. Only when she had passed the test was she allowed to ascend the steps to the throne. “The High Priestess was slim and dark-haired. She seemed to be in her late twenties. She spoke to me by thought rather than words. She appeared outwardly solemn as she held court over all the male wizards, but kept cracking mental jokes that only the adepts caught.”

The High Priestess wore a striking pendant, which I asked Rebecca to draw for me. Her drawing showed an equal-armed cross, set within a circle. Crossed staves behind it make the pattern of a diagonal cross within a much larger circle, bordered by a two-headed serpent. The body of the serpent is engraved with writing in Greek characters. There are more inscriptions on scrolls that flank the central cross, which has four crystals in its setting. The wizard who challenged Rebecca wore a simpler version of the same pendant.

For a girl approaching puberty, this dream might carry many levels of meaning. But we spent no time in dream analysis. We celebrated the sense of strength and magic and possibility that Rebecca had drawn from it. She reveled in her special dream relationship with the High Priestess seated above all those powerful men. When I asked Rebecca to sum up the feeling of the dream, she said with little hesitation, “I am coming into my power.”

Nearly three years later, in another spontaneous sleep dream, Rebecca reentered the great hall where she had encountered the High Priestess: 

"This time everything is different. Instead of everyone ignoring me, all the high priests from all the worlds bow down to me and hold out their arms to me.

"The High Priestess stands and holds out her arms. She says, Come, let me show you my mind. Only she does not exactly say it; she suggests it.

"She takes my hand. From her forehead a bright light emerges, and in the bright light I see a gate. I walk toward this gate. When I pass through it, I encounter three beings. The first is a bird-headed man who has given me guidance before. He shows me what happens to people who sell out their values in life. The second is a woman I know to be an immortal. She wears a crowned helmet and carries a shield and spear. She tells me, We are one and the same. The third is a man I do not know. I have the feeling this man will be important in my future life.

"When I finish observing this man, I see another gate to walk through. I travel in this way until the bright light dims and all I can see are the eyes of the High Priestess, shining against a dark rectangle that may be a mask."

These dream experiences accompanied Rebecca’s passage from girlhood into womanhood. In her outer life, no sacred ritual was conducted to mark this passage. But she was called through the dream gates, into a larger life.

 

References

1. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) pp. xii. x.

2. Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (Princeton: Bollingen, 1991) pp.82-83

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "The Eleusunian Mysteries" by  Paul Sérusier, 1888

 

Through the dream gates to initiation

 

True initiation involves both ordeal and ecstasy. “The majority of initiatory ordeals more or less clearly imply a ritual death followed by resurrection or a new birth,” commented the great religious historian Mircea Eliade. “The novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.”[1] The initiate is a made man or woman.

The hunger for transcendence, through a primal, direct encounter with the sacred, leads people down strange and dangerous byways: into experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, into dubious cults and ersatz Nativism. Yet the authentic call to initiation continues to resonate in our dreams. And through the dream gates, it can be followed to a genuine consummation. Arguably, it can hardly be pursued in any other way since — whatever the externals of ceremony and culture — true spiritual initiation and apprenticeship always take place on the inner planes, in a deeper order of reality.

Even in societies where Mystery initiation was regarded as central to human fulfillment, and its gates and secrets closely guarded, the validity of an individual dream calling and initiation was honored. There is a fascinating story about this from the Hellenistic world, preserved by Sopatros, a teacher of rhetoric. A man dreamed he had attended the epopteia, the crowning revelation of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He recounted the secret rituals of the Telesterion in vivid and accurate detail to an initiate of the Greater Mysteries. But in ordinary reality, the dreamer was not a “made man.” 

The initiate to whom he told his dream was shocked that he was speaking openly about things he had no right to know and denounced him for sacrilege. He was dragged into court, where his accusers demanded the death penalty. However, the defense argued successfully that the gods themselves had played a part of the hierophant in his dream. His dream of initiation was recognized as true initiation; the dreamer would now be respected as an epoptes — one who had “seen” and gone through the sacred fire.[2]

Contemporary dreamers who have never heard of Eleusis have dreams of the same quality.

At the winter solstice, just after her twelfth birthday, Rebecca had a powerful dream that carried her deep into the Otherworld. In her dream, she was invited to enter an immense hall. It was filled with robed figures she described as “wizards.” They came from many races and traditions; she recognized a “Merlin” character among a Celtic contingent. 

A woman robed in white sat enthroned above the throng. She beckoned to Rebecca to approach her. The male wizards ignored Rebecca except for the forbidding figure who moved to block her path. He challenged her to pass a test. Only when she had passed the test was she allowed to ascend the steps to the throne. “The High Priestess was slim and dark-haired. She seemed to be in her late twenties. She spoke to me by thought rather than words. She appeared outwardly solemn as she held court over all the male wizards, but kept cracking mental jokes that only the adepts caught.”

The High Priestess wore a striking pendant, which I asked Rebecca to draw for me. Her drawing showed an equal-armed cross, set within a circle. Crossed staves behind it make the pattern of a diagonal cross within a much larger circle, bordered by a two-headed serpent. The body of the serpent is engraved with writing in Greek characters. There are more inscriptions on scrolls that flank the central cross, which has four crystals in its setting. The wizard who challenged Rebecca wore a simpler version of the same pendant.

For a girl approaching puberty, this dream might carry many levels of meaning. But we spent no time in dream analysis. We celebrated the sense of strength and magic and possibility that Rebecca had drawn from it. She reveled in her special dream relationship with the High Priestess seated above all those powerful men. When I asked Rebecca to sum up the feeling of the dream, she said with little hesitation, “I am coming into my power.”

Nearly three years later, in another spontaneous sleep dream, Rebecca reentered the great hall where she had encountered the High Priestess: 

"This time everything is different. Instead of everyone ignoring me, all the high priests from all the worlds bow down to me and hold out their arms to me.

"The High Priestess stands and holds out her arms. She says, Come, let me show you my mind. Only she does not exactly say it; she suggests it.

"She takes my hand. From her forehead a bright light emerges, and in the bright light I see a gate. I walk toward this gate. When I pass through it, I encounter three beings. The first is a bird-headed man who has given me guidance before. He shows me what happens to people who sell out their values in life. The second is a woman I know to be an immortal. She wears a crowned helmet and carries a shield and spear. She tells me, We are one and the same. The third is a man I do not know. I have the feeling this man will be important in my future life.

"When I finish observing this man, I see another gate to walk through. I travel in this way until the bright light dims and all I can see are the eyes of the High Priestess, shining against a dark rectangle that may be a mask."

These dream experiences accompanied Rebecca’s passage from girlhood into womanhood. In her outer life, no sacred ritual was conducted to mark this passage. But she was called through the dream gates, into a larger life.

References

1. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) pp. xii. x.

2. Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (Princeton: Bollingen, 1991) pp.82-83

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Marble head of a priestess of Athena from Pergamon, early 2nd century CE. She seemed very familiar when I met her again in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. 

Nandi on Another Plane

 

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back. We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply. 

Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst of our errors. Sometimes in those special moments when the universe gets personal we understand that those who live beyond the veil are simply asserting their presence and letting us known we are not alone in our conscious universe.  

I just pulled from my journals a small episode in which we see a dream spilling into ordinary reality and feel the play of greater forces in both realms. The dream could be tagged as precognitive but there is something going on that is surely more important than merely seeing a future event, which I think goes on in dreams all the time though few of us notice or record these experiences, let alone take advantage of them.  

I did not understand the dream until I was on another plane, quite literally. In the dream I drew a line on a statuette of a bull, near a giant statue of the same bull. I knew in the dream that the bull was Nandi, the bull of Shiva, but on waking I had no idea why it featured in the dream. 

The next day I drove to the airport and started out on trip to Europe. On my second long flight to Paris, my rowmate was a pleasant woman from India. She told me she was traveling to rejoin her family in Bangalore, her home city, because her mother had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Our conversation immediately went deep and the space we shared continued to deepen over several hours during that overnight flight. We talked about death, and imagery for healing, and many elements in Hindu religious beliefs and practices. We spoke of Yama, the Hindu death lord, and Ganesha, the opener of doors. Then I said, "Nandi". 

My rowmate smiled with her whole being. She told me there is a temple of Nandi in Bangalore , with a giant bull statue carved from granite. She added that she keeps a miniature statue of Nandi close and regards him as another important protector and gatekeeper. We discussed some specific pujas (offerings) her family might now make to call on support from the greater powers according to their traditions. 

The woman from Bangalore said, "Are you sure you weren't born in India? I feel you are here tonight to remind me of some of the deepest beliefs and practices of my own tradition about how to approach death and the sacred." 

It was one of those moments when you feel the nearness of the Otherworld; that the sacred and the profane are forever at play together, that the realms of mortals and the Shining Ones are, as they say in Ireland, fighthé fuaighté,  "woven into and through each other". I was asked in a recent interview, "How can we know more of the Otherworld?" I responded, "Start by recognizing that you are already inside it."

Dreaming in India ink

“Action is better than inaction” – Krishna to Arjuna.

I continue to be impressed by how dreams can call us to traditions and cultures of which we may have had little or no previous knowledge, from any obvious sources, yet may now prove to be part of our authentic path. One of my students, Maureen, described how she was guided deep into Indian philosophy by a fascinating series of dreams. The sequence began with a dream encounter with a charming Indian man who wanted to escort her on a trip.
     When Maureen asked for specific guidance on her spiritual path, she dreamed she was given two books, one a book for children, the other the Bhagavad Gita. She then joined her sisters – they all used to be champion gymnasts – and they performed in something as important as the Olympics. In company with her sisters, she discovered a “book” composed of five panels. Examined a certain way, the five panels revealed an unusual and highly significant map, drawn in “India ink”, that only she could see. She communicated the map to her sisters by singing its meaning.
      Now: the dreamer had never previously read the Gita. She did not know that it is a “song” (the title means “Song of the Lord” and it is traditionally sung in recitation). She knew next to nothing about Indian philosophy. She certainly did not know that the Greeks in the army of Alexander the Great who encountered yogis called them “gymnosophists” (a word related to “gymnasts” that means “naked philosophers") because these ascetics wore rather little clothing.
     Inspired by her dream, Maureen proceeded to read the Bhagavad Gita. She reported: “I feel as if I am holding a jewel in my hands with this book. I have never been to India, and have no close associations with it - but now it has really grabbed my attention. I feel I am being guided on a question I always wrestle with - how do we live a truly spiritual life in our earthly existence?”
      She felt the gymnasts in her dream had a dual meaning, related to that question. “The lesson I learned from my father about embracing gymnastics not to compete, but to give myself to the sport, to let it be an expression of me, was very liberating for me at the time, and life altering.” As she studied the Gita, she realized that the “five panels” that composed her dream map may relate to the five “immutable truths” and five “causes of action” that Krishna explains to Arjuna.

      She found the Karma Yoga (yoga of Action) in this work highly relevant to her need to make a balance between the practical necessities of life and a spiritual awakening. “Action is better than inaction,” Krishna admonishes Arjuna, on the field of battle. (But think not on the fruits of action...)
      Maureen’s experience is a rich example of how dreaming can guide us in keeping body and soul together as we try to marry a spiritual awakening to the requirements of ordinary life.
      Frjtof Capra dreamed that the subatomic world is Lord Śiva's dance.
      Now I recall that I once told reporters in a dream that I am writing a book inspired by the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - the immense cycle in which the Bhagavad Gita is the central jewel. That would be quite an assignment!

Photo of Krishna and Arjuna by RM