On Spiritual Enthronement, or Fusion with an Aspect of the Higher Self

 

Plotinus said that our most important tutelary spirit is the self on a level above the one we are on. I have found this to be true. I think of this self as my double on the balcony, because in half-dream states I have encountered him on a high roof terrace, a vantage point from which it is possible to find patterns in the confusion of life below and approach life choices with detachment and even a sense of divine comedy.
      I meet this life teacher in interior dialogues, above all, once again, in the half-dream state that researchers call hypnagogia but is more elegantly described as dorveille in Old French, dormiveglia in curent Italian. I feel that at a tremendous turning point in my life, our minds and energies merged.
      Let me try to make a general obseravtion before I turn this discussion over to the record of a conversation I made many years ago. . 
     As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with a higher self and now progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

    “Take heart. I am with you always. I know you better than you know yourself.” This was the opening of communication with an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two.”
     This was the essence of communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995. Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify, and apply in ordinary reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers. What was coming through now was direct knowledge.
     “Your mind on my purpose.”
      That was familiar language, the way this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self that was no stranger gave me some very clear information:

    "When fusion takes place between a focus personality and the Higher Self - that is to say, the control personality on the plane directly above the focus personality -the result is a step forward in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.

    "This progression has taken humans from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects — to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane. Indeed, from this point of view, you are attending the emergence of a new species.Your physical equipment imposes limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of physiological change — in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of cells, and, naturally, in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher, clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise on the planes."

       This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years, I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer than your jugular vein.”

Text adapted from "The Double on the Balcony", chapter 31 of The Boy Who Died and CameBack: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Path to the Higher Self" by Robert Moss

 

 

Dreaming with the Animal Powers

 

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more "power animals" is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body. 

Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d'être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its "bush soul" is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges. 

But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers. 

Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat: After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to "Sit down!" The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit. 

After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog - who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile - appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways. I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the "Opener of the Ways". 

On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand - if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois "woman of power." I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop's fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian. 

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms. The cat in your dreams may be the kitty you remember from childhood, or an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face.

Recently my beloved calico cat, who died several years ago, has taken to visiting me, typically appearing in the drifty state between sleep and awake. She is both herself and a greater being I think of as the Calico Tiger. I am sure she is more than a part of me, and more than the lovely friend who liked to lie on the arm  of my reading chair. In her latest visitation, she brought a whole army of felines with her, large and small - maybe every cat who has shared my life in all the worlds. Some have been worshipped as deities; the others may think that they should be.

Illustration: "Calico Call" by Robert Moss

Put Yourself in a Place where a Greater Power Can Find You.

 

To engage with greater powers, including your creative spirit, or genius, you need to put yourself in a place where you can easily be found. Border territory is good for this, like the borderland between sleep and awake, or the edginess of entering a new field or making a life transition, or the liminal space that opens up when you walk the roads of this world with senses aquiver, aware that everything is alive and speaking to you.. As Australian Aborigines say, the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. I offer you a poem I wrote in this spirit:

 

Hunting Power

 

You say you are hunting your power

But your power is hunting you.

I’ll go up to the mountain, you say.

I’ll fast and live on seaweed

I’ll hang myself on a meat-hook

Under the hot sun. I’ll give up sex

And wine and my sense of humor.

What are you thinking of?

For you to go hunting your power

Is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

 

Go out in the garden any night

Step one inch outside the tame land

And you are near what you seek.

Open the window of your soul

Any night and your guide may come in.

The issue is whether you’ll run away

When you see what it is. To make sure

You succeed, tether yourself like a goat

At the edge of the tiger wood that breathes

Right beside your bed. He’ll come.

 

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

 

A Night with the Princes from the East

The Assignment

An old friend has asked me to lunch with a pair of foreigners, a man and a woman who are Persian or Near Eastern. We go to a restaurant where he disappears to converse with staff in the background. I join the foreign couple at a table. We seem to be the only patrons in the restaurant, which is either windowless or has the windows heavily draped. the decor is expensive but anonymous, generic hotel or airport lounge style.
     The first phase of the conversation is guarded and superficial. I decide I'm ready to go, having discharged my personal obligation.
     My friend approaches me, highly agitated, as I prepare to leave. He gestures at a set of handwritten notes and a typed memo that he slipped to me earlier but I haven't bothered to read. These papers, especially the handwritten notes, make it plain that the people I am lunching with are top priority. It is vitally important for me to pursue the conversation and draw them out, so that their words can be recorded. I have been picked to pursue this opportunity because the couple trust me.
     I yield, lingering at the table to drain glass after glass of armagnac. The man matches me, glass for glass, with cognac. The mood is increasingly jolly and intimate. I can only guess at the size of the bill for all these drinks, but I plan to present the bill to my friend. The waiter seems to be in on the plot. He refers to us as "Excellencies" and "Your Highnesses." It seems the "assignment" will be completed by the end of our session, which looks likely to continue for the rest of the afternoon.

I woke from this dream in a pool of moonlight, lying on a bed in a cabin on North Hero Island on Lake Champlain. I was excited and intensely curious, wanting to know much more about the message I was supposed to record. I needed to go back into the dream, and made it my intention to do this, lying on my back on the bed. I kept a pad and paper close to my hand. If I succeeded in resuming my conversation with the mysterious strangers, I was determined not to forget my assignment to record the proceedings.

The Prince and Princess of Fars 

I focus on the restaurant as my portal for dream reentry.. The name of the restaurant is "The Golden Cage" or "The Golden Bowl". I confirm that the restaurant, though spacious, is tightly sealed - no views of the outside. 

     I try to examine the papers my friend gave me. I find there are three documents, in a large manila envelope: handwritten notes, on several smallish pieces of high-quality bond; a typed memo; and a clipping from a newspaper. The newspaper is the Tehran Times. The headline describes a visit by "The Prince and Princess of Fars."

     I need to talk to them.

     The man shows himself. He is pleasant-looking, clean-shaven, with an oval face, black hair combed straight with the slightest suggestion of sideburns, large dark brown eyes, immaculately dressed. The woman's features, by contrast, are indistinct. She is veiled, not in Islamic style but in "High Priestess" mode of the Tarot trump.

     The man is Shams. I met him in a previous dream. He is wearing a beautiful grey-blue shirt with a narrow white banded collar under his tailored suit. He says I may know the veiled princess as Fatima. He urges me to study the typed sheet my friend gave me. I review the paper, and find it contains a list of 20 questions. The first questions give me shivers:

1. What is the nature of exile?
2. What are the conditions for the return?

As I record the questions on my pad, Shams, gives me his responses, for the record:

1. What is the nature of Exile?

To be an exile is to be separated unwillingly from your homeland. This is the condition of the soul when it comes into the body. It is the condition of the higher man when he is separated from his Higher Self.

2. What are the conditions for Return?

The return requires courage, the willingness to deny the ways of the world. It is always a journey to the Mountain. It requires cutting the cord of attachment to worldly things.
    There are many tests and obstacles along the way, also distractions and temptations. But Home reaches out to guide the returning exile. There is always a guide. The appearances of the guide are almost always unexpected. The face may be that of a familiar friend, or a stranger.

3. What is the Source?

The Source is the bottomless well of remembering. You may see it as a passage or a bore-hole, leading to inexhaustible reserves. Do not confuse the bore-hole with what lies beyond it. From a certain viewpoint, the bore-hole is also the birth canal. You may learn to swim back, into the Water of life, into the womb of the Ancient Mother.

4. Who is the Guide?

The guide is the emissary of the level of Intelligence - the level of the Real - that you are able to work with at this time. The guide takes the form you are ready to recognize.

5. What is the Kingdom?

The kingdom is this world. But a true crown is earned only through the blessing of the Other World. the true crown is Xvarnah.

6. Is there eternal conflict between good and evil?

There are competing forces in the cosmos. Humans interact with the battles and struggles of races beyond the human. The conflicts of this world are related to those of subtler kingdoms.
In dealing with problems of good and evil, humans must know that
- In the universe, humans interact and have intercourse with beings other-than-human that are friendly, neutral, hostile or inimical to men.
- Demons are real, often generated by human thought and emotion.
- There are "criminal souls".
- The principle of "active evil" is also a real phenomenon.
- In the world of duality, it is necessary to take sides. Embodied beings, in a world of duality, cannot evade this choice.

7. What is the work of the Invisible Schools?

You are born (which is to say, re-born) within a spiritual tradition or lineage. You are called in dreams and visionary states to resume contact with teachers of your Order. You may be invited to attend other schools but you are born with one primary connection.


8. What are the conditions for soul travel?

The keys to the practice are in meditation, concentration, the presence of the guide, courage for the journey. Also a trustworthy map and a password. Above all, the traveler's robe.
It is not only a matter of leaving the physical body, but of putting on the heavenly body.
This has to be earned, to be grown (or rather, re-grown).
     The celestial body, the true Body of Light, is required for the high experience of soul travel.

I broke contact for a moment to tiptoe into the bathroom. When I returned, I was given some personal information, and was then able to return to the questions. The ninth question involved the nature of the soul. We got through 13 of the 20 questions, but the quality of my reception began to waver, and we agreed to reserve the completion of the dialogue for another time. I dated my journal report as I always do. August 1, 1998.
     I pulled on shirt and shorts and walked down to the lake. In the twilight before dawn, I lay out on the floating dock and watched the changing light on the lake. A silver streak near the horizon gradually increased in size. 

      A rosy blush spread over it, cloudlike against the silver, until the water looked more like the sky than the sky itself. A field of bright, clear blue, shaped like an elongated triangle, emerged within the rosy "clouds". I seemed to be looking into a lake in the sky, into an Otherworld landscape. Fish broke the surface. The black silhouettes of nightbirds and early fishers glided above the lake, to plunge after fish. I saw a kingfisher, mighty in head and chest, take possession of the far shore.

Drawing by Robert Moss: "The Princes from the East"

Trickster as Guide: In Praise of Marty

 

The other night, drifting in that liminal state between sleep and awake, I heard a car horn, honking several times. I was quite irritated. Who thought it was okay to beep for someone in a neighboring house in the middle of the night? Then I recollected that sounds from the street rarely reach my bedroom at the back of the house. And then realized that the sounds were coming from inside, not outside, my head.

I closed my eyes again and a vivid scene immediately appeared. The centerpiece was a blue Cadillac convertible, with the fins of a previous era but in shiny new condition. At the wheel was a fellow sporting a loud plaid suit and a felt hat, and brandishing a fat cigar.

I knew him, of course. I have met him in dreams and dreamlike states over quarter of a century. I know him as Marty, pronounced in a distinctive New York way, as Morty. I suppose it could be spelled that way but I have always recorded it as Marty and he has never corrected me, so that's how it will stay.

"Put on a good suit," Marty instructed me. He was inviting me out for a night on the town. The blurred shapes behind him resolved into the facades of restaurants and bars and nightclubs, with a Cajun flavor.

Well, why not? I found my way to a wardrobe - not my regular one. When I opened it I saw that the clothes on the hangers were more than sets of jackets and pants. They were whole body suits. If I stepped into one, I would alter my physique accordingly. Nice kind of dress-up for an outing on the astral plane. I chose a body with strong broad shoulders and a trim waist, an idealized version of my younger, fitter self.. It came encased in a midnight blue double-breasted suit. Yes, this would do nicely.

What followed was simply a fun night out in a body that works better than my current one, fun for its own sake. This is one of Marty's specialities. Let me go back to the start of our relationship.

Marty first visited me when I set an intention for dreaming. The fancy name for this is dream incubation and in some traditions it is approached with great reverence, with ritual and purifications and offerings to deities and priests. I generally find it sufficient to just frame a clear intention and repeat it in my mind as I approach the night.

I really needed guidance from a wiser source that night. I was in the midst of writing the book that was published as Conscious Dreaming, the book that introduced the original blend of dreamwork and shamanic journeying that I call Active Dreaming. I had an enthusiastic publisher, but my editor had pointed out that "dream books don't sell many copies". I wanted to reach as many people as possible, not for fame and money, but to help break the dream drought that had become so pervasive in modern culture.

So I set this intention: Show me how to bring the gifts of dreaming to many more people.

In the dream that followed, I found myself under the big top in a circus. The bleachers were packed. In the center of the ring, a man in a loud plaid suit, with a pork pie hat, a mustache and a huge cigar, was doing acrobatics. He turned cartwheels then somehow managed to bounce from the ground up to the very top of the tent. As he repeated these unlikely maneuvers, I became fully aware that I was dreaming. I remembered that I had asked for guidance.

I stared, incredulous, at the clownish acrobat performing impossible feats. I knew, in that instant, that his name was Marty, pronounced the New York way. Was he supposed to be my guide?

Marty vaulted into the bleachers, grabbed an attractive blonde, and started cuddling and smooching. As I watched this new performance, shocked. he blew out a great cloud of smoke. He gave me a wink and said, round the edge of his stogie, "It's about entertainment, kid. It's about entertainment."

I came back from the dream laughing. I recognized I had received exactly the guidance I needed. Keep people turning the pages. Give them stories they can live in for a while. Never forget that a story may be the shortest route between a human being and the truth. And that the deepest truths may "in laughing guise be dress'd".

So I'm always grateful when Marty shows up. His hat style changes, and he's not always in a suit that might be most appropriate for a racetrack tout. He sometimes appears in a top hat and a tuxedo, even full tails. Still there is always something a little louche about his appearance. Last year he turned up riding a bike around a circus ring. His attire was Edwardian-formal until you looked below the waist.

Marty confirmed my long-standing opinion that there is a Cosmic Costume Department for inner guides. They present themselves in the forms appropriate to our levels of perception and understanding, and the messages they intend to convey. 

It's about entertainment, kid.

Drawings (c) Robert Moss

When the Bull was My Healer

I am going to continue to post and repost some of my personal narratives of healing through the imagination in the hope that they may arouse you to work more actively with your personal imagery, your animal spirits, and your inner guides. I recorded this experience in Barcelona on February 13, 2013

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I did [before the pandemic]. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and another depth workshop I was leading in Utrecht the following weekend. I looked forward to exploring Gaudi territory and enjoying a little sun and sea .
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today, Wednesday, in Barcelona. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It takes me some thinking before I get the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I say, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sense approval.
    Then a power rushes into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminds me of the bull, and I recall my encounter, walking the city the previous day, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I feel this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me, expanding my energy field. I start to feel huge, and strong.
    I feel a second stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light comes washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision forms spontaneously, showing me how my body has been invaded and how its defenders are now moving with decision to trap and destroy the invaders. The scene resembles the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the portcullis of the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watch with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders. Now I see the brilliance of allowing the agents of infection through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watch the mass execution of the germs under the direction of a lordly figure wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack falters and the grisly germ-warriors die, I see a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leap from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle has been won. I go to the bathroom and cough over the sink. No pain. The phlegm that comes out is now brown, not green or yellow. I am expelling the corpses of the illness army. I feel vastly restored.
     When I return to bed and close my eyes, I am back at the scene of battle. Again, it is vividly alive and the action has clearly continued during my bathroom break. I am delighted to see that the defense forces are now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summons women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appear on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.
     I get out and about happily that morning, and travel on to my next workshop full of bright energy.

What can you take from my story? For starters, the need to recognize that we have inner as well as outer resources and can invoke greater powers for healing. It is very important to set our intentions wisely. If we are going to engage the active support of those greater powers, we must do more than ask for a quick fix, or recycle some hand-me down stuff. It is no less important to trust in the vital reality of the imagination, and to work with the spontaneous images that come to us. And to recognize that the most propitious time for adventures in imaginal healing may come in the twilight zone between sleep and awake.

The key takeaways are these:

1. Remember to ask for help from greater powers
2. Be ready to work with animal spirits and mythic allies
3. Imagine that if an infection has entered your body it can be confined in a holding space and defeated there without gaining access to all of your body. My spontaneous imaginal battle, played out in what seemed to be the barbican of a medieval castle, becomes extraordinarily relevant when we look at the spikes of the virus, so reminiscent of a medieval war mace.

 

Three Words from Emerson in the House of Time

While leading an adventure in Active Dreaming, I guided a group of brave and ready souls on a journey to a real place in the Imaginal Realm that I call the House of Time. It is the kind of locale that creators, shamans and mystics have always wanted to visit, a place where we may encounter an inner teacher who is the master of any field that compels our best attention and study, and where any book of secrets - even that Book of Life containing our sacred contract - may be accessible. If you would like to go there, you’ll find detailed instructions in my book Dreamgates.

      While drumming for the group to provide fuel and focus for the journey to the Library in the House of Time, I found myself in contact with intelligences who have guided and inspired my work in the past. It seemed that Ralph Waldo Emerson, in high collar and frock coat, had joined the group. I do not say this was the individual spirit of the great sage; I do not claim the privilege of a personal interview, and I am sure that wherever Emerson may now be, he has many things to do. I say only that for a few moments I seemed to be in the presence of a figure who embodied some essence of Emerson's thought. I was eager to receive insights I could easily retain, while my consciousness was working on several levels, including that of drumming for the members of the group and watching over their own adventures.

    
My Emerson gave me three words: Rectitude. Plenitude. Attitude. The following morning, in the twilight before dawn, as the first pink suffused the gray sky, I tracked these clues through Emerson's essays and letters, and through the pedigrees of the terms themselves. 

RECTITUDE

In its origin, rectitude is the virtue of being straight, or upright, in your conduct and condition. It derives from the Latin rectus or straight. It has nothing to do with a narrow moralism. As Emerson wields this word, it is the property and armor of the brave soul who dares to live by his own lights. In his famous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School - a speech the faculty tried to suppress but the senior class insisted upon - Emerson defined "the grand strokes of rectitude" as "a bold benevolence", and that independence of mind that enables us to ignore the counsel and caution of our friends when they seek to hold us back from pursuing our calling, and the readiness to follow that calling without concern for praise or profit. Those who can do this are "the Imperial Guard of Virtue" and "the heart and soul of nature." They "rise refreshed on hearing a threat"; they come to a crisis "graceful and beloved as a bride"; they can say like Napoleon at the Massena that they were not themselves until the battle began to go against them.

PLENITUDE

Plenitude is fullness or abundance, coming from the Latin plenus, or "full". For Emerson, plenitude - abundance - is our natural condition, and we miss it only by failing to live from the fullness and integrity of our own spirit. When we develop self-trust, we gain "the plenitude of its energy and power to repair harms," he instructs in his essay on Heroism. "There is no limit to the Resources of Man," he adds in a letter on that theme. "The one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is...that the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise."

ATTITUDE

Attitude has an even more suggestive etymology. It first came into usage to describe the posture an actor playing a role strikes on the stage. Go further back, and we find it is kissing cousins with the word "aptitude" and both share a common root in the Latin aptus which means "fit" or "suited" - in short, ready something. Our attitudes indeed determine what experiences we are apt to encounter on our roads of life. "The healthy attitude of human nature," Emerson instructs us in his essay on Self-Reliance, is "the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner" - in other words, the confidence that the universe will support us. In the face of hardship and challenge, we need to strike that posture of determination that "by [that] very attitude and...tone of voice, puts a stop to defeat," Emerson adds in his letter on Resources.

    We are now entering one of the great open secrets of life. "We are magnets in an iron globe," as Emerson wrote in an essay titled "Resources". "We have keys to all doors....The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."  We choose which doors will open or remain closed. We decide what we will attract or repel in life according to whether we are straight, and full, and ready.

Adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Painting: William James Stillman, "The Philosophers' Camp in the Adirondacks" (1858). Emerson is at the center of the scene.


Emerson portrait: Watercolor by Philadelphia artist Nile Livingston

"I come from inside you," says the Goddess

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in dreams, and they assume many guises. I thought this account of how a goddess with a famous name introduced herself to one woman dreamer would be a good story for Mother's Day.
    I'll call the dreamer Lin. She set an intention for the night: "I want to meet my spiritual teacher." Here is the dream that followed, as she reported it to me:

I go to the cemetery where my brother is buried. We meet and hug each other. It's very loving. He wants to come with me but I tell him I can't take him where I am going. 

     A great bear appears. Bear has been my friend, and I feel safe and protected., even when something weird happens.

      Something like smoke is coming out of my solar plexus. I look at it, trying to figure out what's going on. It takes the form of a woman, a kind of misty ghost. "Who are you?" I want to know. "Tell me your name."
      She says, "My name is Athena."
     "Get out of here. You can't be Athena. You can't be my guide, anyway. My guide can't come from inside me. You have to be separate."

     She corrects me. She says firmly, "I can come from inside you." I'm still disbelieving until she tells me to look down. I see my brother's tombstone. The inscription reads: To thine own self be true.

Asked how she felt afterwards, Lin said, "I was shocked awake." True spiritual teachers like to do that: to shock us awake. Asked to describe Athena, Lin said, "She is a goddess of wisdom."  She decided that the dream message was: "I can birth wisdom from inside myself, and I don't need to look outside myself for my guide."

     Lin's dream encounter was fresh and personal. She also felt grounded in family and ancestral traditions, blessed to have met both her deceased brother, and an animal guardian, and a goddess with a great name who was yet no stranger, given form by her own energy and imagination. Athena isn't known as a mother goddess but here she plays mother to a dreamer's understanding of where the truest spiritual teacher is to be found.

Everyday Angels and the Cosmic Costume Department

The well-known psychic Alice Bailey believed that both anonymous companions and other generic dream figures - the train conductor, the taxi driver, the telephone operator - may all be angels in disguise. Maybe you have noticed how such characters sometimes play the role of guardians or guides in your dreams. Here are a few cases from my own dream journals:

The telephone operator

In one dream, I found a message on my telephone answering machine from a troubled woman who had caused a good deal of confusion in my life. As I listened to the message, which was an appeal for a meeting, the voice of the operator came through. The operator explained that she did not want to let calls from this person come through because her intentions were harmful. In my dream, I was able to print out the message, which I then destroyed by putting it through a trash compactor. I often find that the telephone operator in my dreams helps me to screen communications on the inner planes. The telephone operator or switchboard also helps me to route calls to higher sources of guidance. This continues even though, in waking life, in the age of smart phones I rarely have any interaction with old-style telephone operators.

The immigration or customs official
'
Since I do a lot of traveling in this world, these figures frequently appear in waking life. In dreams, they often play a deeper role, although I never dismiss the possibility that I may be dreaming a future situation in regular life. In my dreams, customs officials may discuss whether I am dressed properly or carrying excess baggage and help me to get these things sorted out. Immigration officials play an even more interesting role. In one dream, for example, I noticed that the immigration official to whom I had to present myself at a foreign airport was reading a book on synchronicity. When I expressed interest, he led me into a back room, where several of his colleagues - dressed in blue, high-necked uniforms of a distinctively "French" design - discussed early research on the theme that had been conducted in French. This gave me useful and specific leads for research that found its way into books I proceeded to write.

The hotel manager

In another dream, I found myself in a hotel in a foreign country where a power problem was causing intermittent blackouts throughout a whole city. Then the hotel manager appeared. He was an immensely charming, confident, even radiant, man who assured me that everything could be put right. He proceeded to demonstrate. He increased the voltage on a generator, raising the energy flow to several times the maximum level shown on the gauge. Nothing blew up, and the lights in the city came back on. After this dream, I noticed a marked increase in my energy level and was able to complete a book project at record speed.
    The hotel manager often appears to me in dreams as the person responsible for the management and effective operation of the whole establishment - i.e., my whole psychospiritual condition. 

The maitre d' and the chef

The restaurant manager or maitre d' figures in my dreams as the person who oversees my social and eating habits. The dream chef plays a deeper role, on stage or backstage. He often represents my inner creator. In a turning point dream, both figures played shocking but very helpful roles. I was struggling at the time with a book project.
    I had contracted to write a thriller with a Russian theme, following the popular success of my earlier novel Moscow Rules but my heart wasn't in it. I did not want to repeat myself and was feeling a deep call to change the whole direction of my life and my writing. I turned to my dreams for help. I set the intention, on going to bed, to receive dream guidance on writing my new "Russian" thriller. I stepped into a dream that seemed promising. A huge banquet hall had been set up in my honor. I noted that the place settings included the finest china, and that the cutlery seemed to be made of silver and gold. But the maitre d' rushed up, wringing his hands. He tol me there was a problem in the kitchen. The master chef did not like my menu. He refused to cook any more stroganoff., If I insisted on a Russian entree, he would quit.
    I woke up chastened. I understood that - through the message from the unseen master chef - my creative spirit had given me clear guidance. I tore up a contract because of that dream, abandoning the Russian thriller for fresh literary adventures that led me to publish a series of historical novels involving Native American dream shamans, and eventually my nonfiction books on Active Dreaming.

The taxi driver

I learn a lot from taxi drivers in dreams, where they are quite as unpredictable as in New York City. When I turned to historical fiction, a cabdriver turned up in a splendid vintage car. I entered into a most rewarding conversation with him after the initial dream. Wide awake but still connected to the energy of the dream, I sat down with pen and pad and asked him a series of questions, carefully recording his responses. 

The elevator operator

This is someone who can help to transport you to higher levels. He may or may not hold the door open for you if you are running late, or expect a tip. In one of my dreams, an elevator operator waited for me patiently while I carried a dead relative who was in a bad way, groggy and disoriented, into an old-fashioned lift. When we had risen to a higher floor, the dead person vanished into a television set inside the lift

The doorman or security guard

At any important threshold, we may challenged to establish our right of entry, to show ID and perhaps to lay down things we are carrying that do not belong where we are going. In dreams, as in ordinary life, the doorman or security guard plays a vitally important role. We may come to recognize the many forms of the Gatekeeper, that archetypal entity that opens or closes our doors and paths in life and between the worlds.

I have come to think that there is a Cosmic Costume Department for spiritual guides. They appear to us in forms that we can perceive. I have given examples of guides appearing in everyday dress. They may put on much wilder outfits, including the forms of wild animals. Their purpose is to get our attention. Sometimes that requires reassuring camouflage; sometimes it requires shock tactics.

Parts of this article are adapted from "Dream Guides and Guardian Angels", chapter 8 of Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.

Image: Makeup Room at the National Theatre, London.

Amnesia and Anamnesis: The Journey of the Forgetful Envoy

Life is a process of remembering and forgetting, forgetting and remembering.

    The theme of the forgotten mission is beautifully conveyed by the “Hymn of the Soul” in the gnostic Acts of Thomas. The hero is sent from the East into Egypt in search of the Pearl beyond price, which may be his own Higher Self. Drugged by the food and drink of the country where he now finds himself, he forgets who he is. From the distant land from which he has come, the king and queen and “all the princes of Parthia” send a message to awaken him to the memory of who and what he is and recall him to his forgotten mission.

    The same theme resonates, in modern dress, in Doris Lessing’s allegorical novel Shikasta. An envoy is sent to Earth from a higher civilization in a distant galaxy. To reach his destination, he must pass through a vast waiting area, a plane of mists and illusions, where souls wander between incarnations. On Earth, the envoy succumbs to the miasmal conditions; he forgets who he is and why he has come. An new envoy must be sent to remind him.
    Does the story sound familiar? It could be yours. It has certainly been mine.
    One of my favorite literary versions is Herman Hesse's novella The Journey to the East.  In a time of social collapse, when "there was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality", the narrator joins a pilgrimage to the East under the guidance of a mysterious order described only as the League. He journeys far in search of his spiritual home and regains the knowledge of essential things, such as his purpose for living. However, when he returns to his former environment, he loses his journals and souvenirs and begins to doubt whether his experiences were real. People around him don't believe his accounts. Soon he succumbs to their skepticism. He wonders whether the League itself is only a figment of his imagination.
    But the League has not forgotten him. He is one of its own. He is invited to read his personal file in the League archives. He discovers that four centuries earlier, in another lifetime, he also belonged to the League. He is ashamed. How could he possibly have forgotten this? In a secret alcove, he is permitted to draw back a veil and makes his most extraordinary discovery. It is a small statue that proves to be two figures in one, joined back to back. One of the figures is the traveler himself. In the other, he recognizes the features of the guide who led him on his journey to the East.
    As he studies the twinned figures, amazed, the statue comes to life. His own image melts and flows into that of the guide. It seems that, when fusion is complete, his ordinary self will be absorbed into the larger identity of the guide, the form of a Higher Self.

    Like Hesse's League, our true spiritual teachers do not forget. When we open ourselves to the possibility of remembering who we are and what we might become, they communicate clearly. To receive their knowledge — and recover the knowledge that belonged to us before we came through the tunnel of the birth canal — we must be in a corresponding state of consciousness. As Anaïs Nin remarked, “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

    Ordinary consciousness is a candle bobbing on a dark river, casting an inconstant circle of light across the water, in which an occasional creature from the deep can be glimpsed indistinctly. The river is vast, flowing into a boundless ocean. This is the sea of the greater Self. We cannot see it by the light of our daily trivial mind, which scarcely combs back the darkness.
    When I was a lonely adolescent in Australia, an inner guide who appeared to me in the form of a radiant young man from the eastern end of the Mediterranean reminded me that the knowledge that matters comes to us through anamnesis. The word literally means "remembering", the antithesis of amnesia. For Plato and the neo-Platonists, it means remembering the knowledge of mind and spirit that belongs to us on a higher plane, knowledge to which we had access before we came into our present bodies.
    Humans are forgetful animals. We forget and remember, remember and forget. Yet our true spiritual teachers stalk us in dreams and speak to us in liminal states of consciousness when we turn off our routine soundtrack and can hear a deeper voice. 

Part of this text is adapted from chapter 14, "Soul Remembering" in Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Song of Shambhala" by Nicholas Roerich

Many faces of the Guide

The Guide can take many forms, in dreams and on the roads of waking life. Our true spiritual teachers often use shock or humor in their efforts to wake us up to the real nature of things, and they love to play dress-up.
     An earnest woman in a church group once asked me, at the break, whether she could meet her guardian angel in her dreams. "Absolutely", I told her. When I began to explain the process of dream incubation, she interrupted me. "I've done that three times, and each time I asked to meet my guardian angel, I got Garfield the Cat."
     I asked her to explain to a visiting space alien, "Who is Garfield the Cat?" She explained that he's greedy and always looking out for Number One. "Angel means messenger", I pointed out to her. Could there be a message in Garfield's approach to life? This earnest woman, who had clearly given a lot of her life to service to others, thought about this, then stole a quick look at the buffet and asked, with a mischievous glint in her eyes, "Would it be okay to jump the line and get some chocolate cake while it's still left? I reassured her that Garfield, as guardian angel, would say "Absolutely.”
    The angel can be terrifying as well as funny. Rumi evokes beautifully the terror Mary felt when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her in the moment of annunciation. In the presence of a supremely greater power, she literally jumps out of her skin. Whereupon the angel who is patron of the astral realm and of dream travel says to her (in paraphrase): "You flee from me from the seen to the unseen, where I am lord and master? What are you thinking of?"

    The truth of our dealings with higher sources of knowledge - and above all the Guide of our soul - is that we don't need to go looking for them because they are forever looking for us. When Dante at last finds Beatrice (the Guide appearing in the form of a beautiful women he loved and lost) after the terrible journey through all the hells of the medieval imagination, she reproaches him that for many years she was seeking him in dreams, and he would not listen.

    The Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. It's like that with the powers of the deeper world. Here's a poem I wrote about this:

Hunting Power

You say you are hunting your power

But your power is hunting you.
I'll go up to the mountain, you say.
I'll fast and live on seaweed
I'll hang myself on a meat-hook
Under the hot sun. I'll give up sex
And wine and my sense of humor.What are you thinking of?
For you to go hunting your power
Is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

Go out in the garden any night
Step one inch outside the tame land
And you are near what you seek.
Open the window of your soul
Any night and your guide may come in.
The issue is whether you'll run away
When you see what it is. To make sure
You succeed, tether yourself like a goat
At the edge of the tiger wood that breathes
Right beside your bed. He'll come.

"Hunting Power" is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories published by Excelsior Editions (State University of New York Press).

Drawing by RM