Churchill’s Art of Vision Transfer

It’s June 1940. England stands alone against the Nazi horde that has overrun Western Europe, and Hitler looks invincible. Churchill, Prime Minister for just one month, speaks to the people and warns them of the stakes. If the British people fail to resist Hitler, the world will be plunged “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

     But defeatism is everywhere. It has rotted the British establishment, and keeps America on the sidelines. How can Churchill transfer the vision of possible victory against terrible odds? He delivers his most famous sentence: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

    These words seized the imagination of a people. They transferred moral courage and confidence. Let’s notice two distinctive elements in Churchill’s vision transfer that helped it to take root in the minds of many.

    The first is the time shift. He carries his listeners with him into the far future, beyond current dangers into a time where everything has long been resolved. He persuades his audience that victory over Hitler is not only inevitable, but was won long ago - so brilliantly that anything that has followed looks like an anti-climax.

      Then there is the shift to the witness perspective. He stirs us to do our duty now (‘brace ourselves to our duties”). But at the same time he lifts us, with his words, to a place above, a place of eagles. We look down on our current struggles from a higher level. The bigger self looks down on the smaller self, and says with admiration, “This was their finest hour.”

     Churchill brings his audience inside his tremendous imagination, where the war is already won.

We can learn from Churchill how to transfer a vision to someone in need of a vision.  Let’s review the two key elements.

First, we take ourselves – and then others – through the power of imagination to a future in which an issue or conflict has already been successfully resolved. We build a happy future we can believe in, and that imagined future gives us traction to get beyond current difficulties.

Second, we inspire those for whom we are spreading a vision to rise above the current worries, and look at everything from a bigger perspective. We invite them to inhabit the Big Story, not the old history and the thousand reasons why success is impossible.

We give them a bigger dream, and invite them to live that dream, and bring the world with them.

Adapted from Robert Moss, The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence andImagination published by New World Library.

Seven Open Secrets of Imagination

The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck and set ourselves up for failure because we buy into a limited or self-defeating version of reality, and refuse to see our situation differently.

    The answer lies within us, in the power of imagination. We are ruled by images; they are the “facts of the mind” (as the poet Coleridge called them) that turn us on and turn us off and program our bodies for wellness or disease. To live richer and more creative lives, we want to learn to choose the images to which we give energy and belief. We can do this by learning and harnessing the seven open secrets of imagination:   

1. If we can picture our blocks, we can move beyond them

Mandy was terrified of speaking in public, even in front of two or three people. I asked her if she could feel what was blocking her. She could; it felt like a choke collar. I asked if she could see that collar. She saw it as antique lace of the kind her grandmother used to wear. Once she had that image, she was able to work successfully to release herself from the choke-hold of a family tradition that held that it is the role of women to suffer in silence. When she found an image of her block, Mandy moved beyond it and claimed her voice.

2. The body believes in images and they can help it to heal and stay well

An image sends electrical sparks through your whole body. This shows up when brainwaves are recorded by an EEG. At the same time, an image sends a stream of chemicals washing through you. If you dwell on images of grief and failure, you are manufacturing “downers”. If you can shift your mind to a relaxing scene you produce a natural tranquilizer whose chemical structure is very similar to Valium. If you  summon up images of triumph, you mobilize neuropeptides that boost your immune system.

     In its internal workings, the body does not seem to distinguish between a strong image and a physical event. There is immense potential for healing here – as is increasingly recognized in the healthcare community, if we choose to give our focus to positive  images that are right for us. Where do we get those images? From happy life memories, and from our dreams, which are a great factory of customized imagery for self-healing.

3. If you can see your destination, you are better than halfway there

Harriet Tubman saw roads to freedom. She saw them in dreams and visions in which sometimes she was flying like a bird over landscapes she has never seen with ordinary eyes. She led 300 escaping slaves along those roads, guided by her vision maps, and never lost one of her “packages” to the posses and the bloodhounds.

     We want to grow a vision of possibility. We want to practice seeing and sensing ourselves enjoying the fulfillment of our heart’s desires, in our dream home, or our dream job, or with our dream partner or community. If we can grow a vision strongly enough in our inner senses – and if it is guided by the heart and the gut and not merely the head – then that vision has traction. It helps to pull us towards our destination.

4. The Big Story is hunting us

The Big story – the one that can give us the courage to get through whatever life throws at us – is hunting us. It makes itself known in dreams and through the play of coincidence. We allow it to find us by making a date, preferably seven days a week, with the most important book we’ll ever own: our personal journal.Writing a journal is taking a walk in the bush. The longer you write, the further you get away from safe places and much-traveled roads. You’re now in the wild. And you’re in that state of alert relaxation that is going to encourage something large and powerful that lives in the wild to leap at you from hiding and claim you. That’s how you get your big story, the story that wants to be told – and lived – through you. You go where it can catch you.

5. There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real

For each of us, there is a place of imagination – maybe many places – that are altogether real. One of these, for me, is a magical library of which I never tire. Any book in this library opens another world, and master teachers are accessible here.

    Spend a few minutes, any day you can, building your own home in the imaginal realm – a place where you can rest and relax and get creative ideas or receive healing or have fun with your favorite people. You’ll find this wonderfully restorative. You may also find that the stronger you build your dream place in your mind, the greater the chance that it will manifest in the world.

6. We can transfer a vision to someone in need of a vision

We have the ability to grow a vision for someone who needs a vision. After her hysterectomy, Dawn told me she felt “gutted.” I helped her to picture herself inside the blackened, hollowed-out core of an immense California redwood that had survived a forest fire. Despite the gutting, the great tree was vigorously alive, hurling its green spray towards the sky. Dawn made the redwood image part of her daily meditation, and it took on spontaneous life. She entered the blackened core one day to find it had become the nest of the phoenix, and felt herself rise, on shining wings, from the ashes of her pain and loss.

     We can work a vision transfer with one person at a time, or with a whole group or community. Great visionary leaders can wrap a whole people in their vision, as Winston Churchill did in the darkest days of World War II.

7. The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results

Imagine that you can make yourself incredibly small and travel inside the body and repair its cells structure and balance its flows from within.

    Imagine you can travel across time and visit a younger self and provide the counsel and mentorship that younger self needed in a time of ordeal.

     Imagine you can communicate with your self on a higher level, and get a wiser perspective on all your issues – and return with a road map that will get you where you need to go.

     Imagine that you can reduce pain with your mind, and can develop this ability to the point where you can dispense with meds even when undergoing root canal work.

     Imagine you can go to a place where you can review your soul’s contract – the set of lessons and tasks you may have agreed to undertake before you came into your present life experience – so you can now remember and complete your true life mission.

      Imagine a workplace that is no longer toxic or stressed out because people make space every morning to share dreams and check whether an innovative solution or a fun idea has come to someone in the night.

I have seen all these things accomplished, through the power of imagination.

What we can imagine has a tendency to become real in our bodies and our world.

So let’s imagine peace and healing, and remember the open secret that Rabindranath Tagore expressed, with poetic insight: “The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: J.R.R.Tolkien, "Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft Elves". The author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was also a fine artist who drew and painted his way through his imagined worlds.

Churchill's Art of Vision Transfer

It’s June 1940. England stands alone against the Nazi horde that has overrun Western Europe, and Hitler looks invincible. Churchill, Prime Minister for just one month, speaks to the people and warns them of the stakes. If the British people fail to resist Hitler, the world will be plunged “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

     But defeatism is everywhere. It has rotted the British establishment, and keeps America on the sidelines. How can Churchill transfer the vision of possible victory against terrible odds? He delivers his most famous sentence: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

    These words seized the imagination of a people. They transferred moral courage and confidence. Let’s notice two distinctive elements in Churchill’s vision transfer that helped it to take root in the minds of many.

    The first is the time shift. He carries his listeners with him into the far future, beyond current dangers into a time where everything has long been resolved. He persuades his audience that victory over Hitler is not only inevitable, but was won long ago - so brilliantly that anything that has followed looks like an anti-climax.

      Then there is the shift to the witness perspective. He stirs us to do our duty now (‘brace ourselves to our duties”). But at the same time he lifts us, with his words, to a place above, a place of eagles. We look down on our current struggles from a higher level. The bigger self looks down on the smaller self, and says with admiration, “This was their finest hour.”

     Churchill brings his audience inside his tremendous imagination, where the war is already won.

We can learn from Churchill how to transfer a vision to someone in need of a vision.  Let’s review the two key elements.

First, we take ourselves – and then others – through the power of imagination to a future in which an issue or conflict has already been successfully resolved. We build a happy future we can believe in, and that imagined future gives us traction to get beyond current difficulties.

Second, we inspire those for whom we are spreading a vision to rise above the current worries, and look at everything from a bigger perspective. We invite them to inhabit the Big Story, not the old history and the thousand reasons why success is impossible.

We give them a bigger dream, and invite them to live that dream, and bring the world with them.

Adapted from Robert Moss, The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence andImagination (New World Library).

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self

Picture this: You are walking a spiraling path up a hill, past immense guardian figures, including a stone lion with a great carnelian in its back, flashing red fire. You enter a domed building that proves to be larger inside than outside. 

     Across the space you see an artist, working on an immense canvas that is set up against the opposite wall. At the bottom of the picture the artist has painted a human figure surrounded by bands of various colors, representing the body inside its multiple energy envelopes.
    This figure seems as small as a candle flame in proportion to the shapes above it, which represent the Higher Self, as encountered on successive levels. The finished area of the canvas is minute in comparison to the vast space of the canvas above, which goes up and up. It is impossible to see where it the picture in progress ends, if it ends.

I walked that spiral path, to the artist at work on a portrait of the Higher Self, in a dream.  It had terrific energy, plenty to share, and I felt that others might like to walk that path and meet their own version of the artist. In a workshop, I spread my dream over and around the group as a tent of vision within which we could visualize and explore successive levels of soul and Self.
      I invited the members of that circle to take the spiraling path, meet their own artist and inspect their own pictures of the Higher Self. While drumming for the group, I journeyed back inside my dream. I felt the great lion stirring, and the heat of the carnelian flashing fire. I reentered the domed building. I was surprised that it seemed to have acquired many windows that I did not recall from the original dream, in which the light streamed down from above, from a high skylight or a roof that was open to sun and moon. 
     When I looked more closely, I saw that the new windows were actually pictures that were being created by the artist selves of other dream travelers in our expedition. Some of these works glowed in translucent colors like stained glass.
     After I sounded the recall, and allowed a little time for people to make notes and sketches, I was eager to hear travel reports. One traveler reported that when she reached the stone lion, she mounted the carnelian on its back, like a saddle, and rode in this way through the entrance to the domed building. She found herself entering a triune state of consciousness: she entered the painting-in-progress, while at the same time merging with the artist and also maintaining a witness perspective that kept her alert to the activity of the other dreamers. 
    As the artist, she said, "I was painting on a swing hung from an unknown realm that swooped higher as I painted up. Abstract shapes in different colors brushed across the canvas and became pathways, river ways, forests that I could enter. Images from dreams, gods, goddesses, and infinite symbols exploded onto the panorama in full color, vibrant and alive. Inside the world I created my soul song. The experience was fast, expansive and filled with infinite joy."
    Another traveler reported: "The painter I encounter is at first a male Renaissance type but then the form disappears and it feels like me. I view a powerful, immense white light, looking something like a wide funnel or pillar, coming down from way high above where the ceiling should have been. Then it is as if I have become immense and the pillar of light is beaming through the top of my head permeating and surrounding me. 
     "There seems to be an entity invisible to me at the source of this light; it seems like a female entity. I am given to understand that this light-force holds the form of me in place, both as a "physical" image and energetically. Then I become aware that there are a number such as me attached to her and we are each living out possibilities that She dreams. They are as if attached by streams of light. They return into her when their lives are done."
     A third traveler reported: “I saw the smaller flame of the personality. Then I simply went into the painting. I found myself standing on one of the lines of a grid or net. The lines go up and down. I began to walk the grid. I realized that at the intersection of the lines there were other lines or pathways that went ‘in’. I could go up or down and then in. Those ‘in’ lines were paths along different timelines. I walked the times of Jeanne d'Arc. Another line took me to the times of Jesus of Nazareth. One pathway leads to the dawn of earth. There are so many lines and possibilities.
    "I saw people I do not know. The one I most want to know more about is not in the world we know. She turned toward me. She looked serene. She seemed to be a wise woman, a healer. She wears a beautiful garment, long and flowing. This robe or dress is lightweight, silky, a tapestry of blues and silvery colors, of a fabric unknown to earth. We communicate or make contact in a language I don't know when I'm back here. That contact felt more real than real. I think she can help me. I do not know if I can help her. She was not as surprised to see me as I was to see her."
     In my own journey, I was surprised that the painter looked like a figure from an earlier time, until part of my awareness fused with his. I studied the bands of color he had painted around the figure like a candle flame and was prompted by an inner voice to name the subtle energy bodies he had depicted in the manner of the Greek initiates: the sarkon pneumatikon, the sarkon astroeides, the sarkon augoeides. Above and beyond these, my artist had evoked a celestial body that has to be earned or re-acquired.
    High above, he had begun to depict a flaming sun-like disk. A shaft of light from this center reached down to the crown center of the figure at the bottom of the painting. Similar rays, or shafts of light, extended to other personalities embodied in different times and places. I understood that this represented a family of selves, joined by a common center - a self on a higher level - who have the same origin and whose fortunes are intimately connected even if they are never aware of each other in ordinary consciousness. They can have contact with each other through their subtle bodies, which are quite mobile, but the key to their deeper identity and life purpose is to be found at their common hub, which in turn is linked to a center on a yet higher level.      
    The reports other dream travelers brought back from this group journey, were no less extraordinary. Traveling with them, while drumming for the circle, I was privileged to see them creating their own portraits of the Higher Self. Our shared experience confirmed some of the central insights of Active Dreaming. A dream is a place. If you have been there once, you can go there again. You can invite others to come with you. When you travel into the dream worlds, you don't have to go alone. And you can learn to maintain consciousness in two or more realities simultaneously.


Photo of lion in the Louvre by Robert Moss

Eldorado Kite

The great bird lifts from my hand

drawn to the sun

on Your breath.

I tug on the string,

trying to drag it down,

forgetting what You taught me:

the falcon longs for the wrist of the King.

This strange wind is too strong for me.

I am rising with the bird

above all that is fenced in,

urgent to cut the cord.

My tame self panics.

It wants to hide among limits and shadows

where air does not move like this,

in animate waves of intent.

Something falls like a worn-out coat

and Your breath blows me as a sail

across oceans of sky

to my home in Your heart

where falcon and falconer are one.

Poems do not require explanations, but I want to tell the story of this one, which is a story of growing a vision for someone in need of a vision.
    I was staying with a generous man who was near death. I had sought various ways to offer help and return his hospitality. I had found a quartzite rock shaped exactly and naturally like the head of a bear and brought it to him as a possible agent of healing.
    But Death was getting ready to take him. He knew that in his body, in his dreams and in the behavior of the ravens that were always around his adobe house in the Southwest.
    I walked the neighborhood, grieving and searching for something to offer that might help him prepare for the Big journey. I saw a hawk overhead, a good sign for me. Coming closer, I saw it was a hawk-shaped kite, so well made you could easily mistake the semblance for the real thing. The kite soared aloft. It had escaped the hand or the pole that had held it.
    What a beautiful metaphor for a soul rising from the body, lifting towards the heavens.
    I wrote the poem for my friend and read it to him at his bedside. He was especially moved by the words about a "strange wind" and air moving differently, and had me read them again. Then, with his failing voice, he read the poem back to me.
    I like to picture him rising, at death, like a falcon that has slipped the leash, to return to the wrist of the Great Falconer above. 

"Eldorado Kite" is in my collection, Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions.

The Wind and the Book: Spontaneous Dream Transfer

We can gift a dream to someone in need of a dream. This may be a healing image, a vision of life possibility, or even a road into the afterlife. I have developed a focused technique that I call Dream Transfer or Vision Transfer which is explained in several of my books, including Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    Sometimes a very wonderful dream transfer is accomplished effortlessly, when we find we have the right dream to give to another person, either the right dream about that person, or a dream of power we can invite them to share.
     When I was writing my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, a European friend, visiting family in the United States, called me and asked how it was coming along. I replied that I had not done much focused writing of book drafts, but that I was relaxed because my whole life experience was feeding this book, and the deadline was still a few weeks away, which seemed like a very long way off to me. As a former journalist - and student - I don't really believe in deadlines until they are so close I have to pull an all-nighter.
     "I don't think you need to worry," my friend said. "I dreamed that you were in a magnificent grove of trees, holding a bunch of typed pages. You decided to take a nap.
     "A magical wind whipped up, carried the pages out of your hands and took them swirling round and round in the air. Finally the wind placed the pages on your belly. You woke up, examined the pages, and exclaimed with joy, 'That's it! My book is done!'"
     I declared that I would make this dream my own, and let it become my creative reality.
     That is exactly what unfolded. When I sat down to work on my new book, the pages flew together. Some flew from my journals, some from this blog, others seemed to come whirling down the chimney or through the skylight.
     I felt that the wind from the dream was with me. I clasped the printouts of my book pages and said, "My book is done!" and hit the Send button to get the digital version winging its way to my editor.
     I am going to call on that dream and that magical wind when my next book deadline is creeping up in the calendar. 

Art by  Irene Alexeeva. inspired by Vladimir Kush

The swan's cure: imaginal healing in Aldous Huxley

Swans ring the bell at the bishop's palace in Wells

He's a cynical, worldly Englishman and right now his body is broken and screaming with pain. He's fallen from a cliff and he's on his back in a hut on an island in Southeast Asia, racked with fever. He is visited by a beautiful bronze-colored girl in a sarong who talks like she's been educated at Oxford before or after spending a year as assistant to a bodhisattva. She knows things about healing that his culture doesn't know and his mind is absolutely unwilling to accept. But she finds a chink in the closed door of that cynical mind, using memory.
     He is from England. Does he know the city of Wells? Of course he knows Wells, he snaps back at her.  She says she used to go walking there, by the water. There was an extraordinary sense of peace. And when she closes her eyes now she can see it all so clearly, green grass and golden sunlight on the stones of the church across the moat, and she can hear the bells and the jackdaws in the tower. Can he hear them too? Yes, he can hear the birds.
    In this way, in her soft lilting voice, chanting more than speaking, she leads the patient inside a scene he remembers until he is there as well as on his sickbed. He can see the daisies and dandelions in the grass, the austere geometry of the cathedral tower challenging the tender blue of the sky.
    "And the swans."
    Yes, the swans. Impossibly beautiful, yet entirely real. He sees the curve of the swans' white breasts lifting and parting dark waters.
    "Effortlessly floating."
    The words give him deep satisfaction. As the dreamy voice leads him, he finds himself floating with the swans, on that smooth surface between darkness below and tender blue above, between here and far away, between one world and another.
    Floating like a white bird on the water, he allows himself to slip into the flow of a great smooth silent river, allowing the sleeping river of life to carry him into a profound peace.
    The patient drifts off, contented, as the voice continues to chant. Above the river, he sees huge white clouds and at her suggestion, he floats up towards them until he is streaming on a river of air, up into the freshness of high mountains.He feels a delicious cool wind on his skin, and falls deeper into sleep, his fever broken.

I have paraphrased an extraordinary passage in Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island (first published in 1962) that is a magnificent description of imaginal healing. When Susila, the beautiful young healer, reports to her doctor father on what she did with the patient (the cynical journalist Will Farnaby) she says "he went off more quickly than expected" because she opened his imagination by calling him to a place in England that he knew. She explains that she worked with indirect rather than direct suggestions. "They're always better." She gave him a different body image, one that suggested grace and strength to carry him beyond his present injury, so it became "a miserable thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing."
     There is a model here for how to grow a vision of healing for someone who is in need of images to make the body well. Start by taking them through the doorway of a life memory. Don't harp on physical symptoms. Give the body - as well as the mind - of the patient living images strong and graceful and fresh enough to shift it beyond its current complaints, as the swan glides on the water or lifts off to claim the sky.