You have other centuries to play with

You have other centuries to play with...In the dream state you meet and interact with your own reincarnational selves...I prefer that you think of them as simultaneous selves. In the dreaming condition there is a great interchange of information with these other portions of your selves.

The speaker is the entity named Seth, as channeled by the remarkable medium and author Jane Roberts in The Nature of Personal Reality. I first read this important book nearly quarter of a century ago. I came to it reluctantly, because I find I often have resistance to channeled material. Maybe that's related to the fact that my great-aunt was a gifted psychic medium, as well as an opera singer, who foresaw my death when I was three years old. She was right; the following winter, I developed pneumonia and "died and came back" - as a physician put it - in a hospital in Tasmania. What spurred me to read Jane Roberts was the arrival of a lively woman from Venezuela at the farm where I was then living. I had met her on a boat on the Amazon river, drinking caipirinhas, which were then unknown in the United States. Before she crossed my threshold, Romelia said urgently, "You must read Jane Roberts."

It was excellent advice. In the Seth books and in her novels - the Oversoul Seven trilogy - Jane Roberts and her source intelligence provide one of the clearest models of the multidimensional self, and of the role of dreaming in awakening to our connections with personalities in other times and dimensions. As in the passage quoted above, Seth invites us to go beyond simplistic, linear approaches to reincarnation. When we step outside chronos time (as we do constantly in dreams) we find that everything is going on now. If I am connected to the druid in Scotland circa 600, or that young priestess-scientist of 2300, then choices I make now can affect them in their own times, as choices they make can affect me, sending influences both ways through the skeins of the web that connects us.

In the Oversoul Seven stories, Jane Roberts dramatizes how all of this may operate, with a lively depiction of a supervising intelligence ("oversoul") that is watching over personalities whose life dramas are unfolding in very different places and times, from the Stone Age to the present. The oversoul is very far from infallible. It is on probation, being supervised by an intelligence on a higher level. It can lose its perspective when it is drawn too deep into the adventures of one of its family of personalities, and even forget that its responsibilities go beyond one life situation.

To know more about such things, Jane Roberts and Seth remind us over and over, we must tune into our dreams, and never forget the correct time, which is always Now. "Realize that now is your point of power."

The portrait of Seth was painted by Rob Butts, Jane Roberts' husband. In one of their sessions, Seth declared that the likeness was "excellent". Before I had access to this picture, I dreamed of a Seth who looked very much like this, and appeared to be a publican in a Northern European fishing port.

The Tarot Fool Comes to Connecticut

Sometimes we can't miss the play of the Greater Trumps that Jung called archetypes but for many centuries before him have been depicted on 22 cards in a deck of 78, and have a way of spilling out of the deck and into the world.

I sit in the library room in the dark for ten minutes to center myself and get clarity. I find myself looking at the scene outside the house from behind closed eyelids. It is all quite simple and realistic: the drive, the parked cars, the barns, the snow on the slope leading up to the road, under the night sky. Then I see a male figure coming long the drive. He looks rather like a tramp. This would not be surprising; all sorts of people wander through the wilderness preserve around this restored colonial manse and may camp out there in all seasons.

But when I look at the walker more closely, I see that he is dressed in soft deerskins. On his feet are long, soft-soled moccasin boots. His hat is shaped a little like a fawn-colored “Robin Hood” hat. He has a tobacco pouch, and a larger leather bag slung from a pole over his shoulder. I realize I am looking at the Tarot Fool, turned woodsman. The more closely I examine him, the larger and less foolish he seems. I know there is treasure in his bag. It seems to contain gold figures, perhaps the living patterns of the world.

I notice that a huge moving truck has come up the drive behind the Fool. The first thing they unload is a complicated machine protected by a glass hood with a gold lion couchant on top. The machine is gleaming silver, antique but impeccably clean and in perfect working order. I recognize it. I have seen a similar machine on a table in the House on the Canal in a big dream of long before. That machine was signed by “Israel Regardie”, who made public some of the papers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I understand that, now as before, I am looking at something constructed by the magicians of this great esoteric order.

I test its workings. For divination, what is required is to feed in a “ticket” at one end of the machine. The question is then processed by being shot and bounced back and forth through many Rube Goldberg-like procedures. When the “ticket” is at last spat out through a slot at the other end, one side contains a closely printed message that includes Hebrew letters, astrological signs, tags from ancient languages, and Masonic codes. However, the real answer is not to be found in the printed message. The true answer is to be sought on the “blank” reverse side. When the card is turned over, the “blank” side becomes a mirror that shows the images projected onto it by godlike beings who have now been drawn in close, possibly because they are entertained by the game with the machine. The archetypes behind the Tarot trumps are now moving in the field.

A beautifully carved box of pale wood, with silk lining, is brought from the truck. Inside is a cream-colored quilt or rug with “ribs” of old gold. The designs are distinctly Persian. Here a cycle of moving energies recalling the Tarot – but with many different images – is depicted in a sequence of rectangular panels.

I look inside the truck. There are stage sets inside. I recognize some of the Trumps moving back and forth. I had a brief interview with a Green Empress who reminds me that the Cave of Earth, a destination for shamanic journeying to which I am planning to lead people this weekend, is her domain.

I see a medieval Death, who looks like a rotting corpse under his black hooded robe. Mastering my fear and disgust,I embrace him. As soon as I do this, he turns into a young and radiant being. This looks good – until I realize that in this moment, I have become the rotting corpse. Fear returns, but I will myself to take my distance and look again. Now I have become young and radiant. My Death now looks on me with kindly and shining eyes. Perhaps they are my own. I remember how Octavio Paz sang that when he encountered Death, he wanted Death to be wearing his own face.

I become aware of a great stir of movement around me. I see that the four great families of the Tarot suits are gathering. The Disk people are distinctly indigenous, Native American and African. The Swords are men in armor from the European past, swinging and clanging metal – Grail knights, Teutonic knights, Highlanders with great killing irons, Romans and Vikings. The people of the cups are Mer-people. The Wands are a tribe of great cats, some in red liveries like the hunting cheetahs of the Nizam of Hyderabad I brought home from a model soldier shop.

Comment: This was a spontaneous vision at the end of an evening session at Great Hollow, a wonderful retreat center in a wilderness preserve near New Fairfield, Connecticut, where I am teaching a one-day playshop on "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" in July. We turned the vision into dream theater the next day, with a company of twenty-two players (a good number for Tarot) from my workshop. The players who impersonated the Rube Goldberg/Israel Regardie Expresso Machine were hilarious. At the time I was also leading a series of classes titled Tarot for Dreamers, in which one of our assignments was to produce our personal Tarot cards. My treatment of the numbers cards was influenced by my Tarot vision.

The Red Bull and the Morrigan

I see a huge red bull, with long silky hair. I know that he is the focus of an ancient battle.
    I see the warriors of two rival armies clashing together - kilted men swinging killing irons.
    Riding through the field of battle comes an immense dark figure, standing proudly erect in a chariot. She is three women in one. Their bodies are joined. Her chariot is not drawn by horses but races forward, powered by the intention of the War Goddess. Its great wheels are armed with scything blades, that mow down the fighting men like tall grass.
     As the bodies of the slain lie in heaps on the ground, the Morrigan divides into three huge black birds. They soar into the air, then swoop down on the fallen, picking out the eyes, stripping the flesh from the bones. They are separating what rots from what endures.
    When their work is done, they come together and the Goddess shows herself as a single being - a ripe, naked woman wearing deer antlers.
     In this form, she rises above the earth. She glides at tremendous speed from the site of the battle to a mountain whose name is Slievnamun. She shows herself here in yet another form - as a lovely young woman who sits above a natural cauldron, a bubbling spring among the rocks. Here and only here (I am informed) can the dread Morrigan be approached in beneficent human form.

from a dawn vision during a weekend of Active Dreaming and mythic drama on Gore Mountain.

Graphic: Louis le Brocquy, The Morrígan, 1969, lithograph. Illustration for Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin.

Bear Giver

From a dream












He walks with me like a faithful dog
though he’s twice my size
and my ancestors feared and revered him so much
they never spoke his name out loud,
calling him Honey-mouth, or Sticky-paw
or the Matchless One. Upright, he seems man
more than animal, though on cold nights
men in the wild would envy his fine warm pelt.

We are going to the animal doctor
not the corner vet but the real thing
because the Bear is ready to give himself again.
He passes without pain, without blood.
The animal doctor explains we must use all of him,
every organ, wasting nothing, sharing with those in need.
We unwrap the Great One as a medicine bundle.
Everything inside his skin is clean and dry,
sorted for use. The gall bladder is prized above all.
It will go to one who has earned it.
When we have used all of him, Bear is reborn,
the same Honey-mouth, in a new body.
The animal doctor says we must remember this always:
When you take from the Bear with respect, wasting nothing
Bear always comes back, in a new pelt.

Now I walk with him in his new body
to help someone who has dreamed him,
padding softly down hospital halls.
The Master of Medicine gives himself over and over.
This is the most natural thing in the world.
There is no end to this, unless our love runs dry
and we forget what he is.

The bear who seems ready to for lunch was photographed on the grounds of Johnson Hall, the last home of Sir William Johnson in upstate New York. Image courtesy of Wanda Burch.

A Master of the Third Eye

“You know what a master is like,” she cautioned me.

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s as likely to whack you as to talk to you.”

I climbed the last steps to the master’s hermitage resolved not to submit to any slap-in-the-face treatment.

I found him with his feet in a tub of hot water. Steam rose and the air was pleasantly scented with mountain herbs as one of his handmaidens palpated his feet. I was curious to see whether she would dry them with her lustrous black hair, that fell to the floor.

“Move the chest,” he directed me.

I contemplated the great iron-banded box without enthusiasm.

“Where?”

He indicated the far corner.

I half-lifted, half-carried the heavy trunk to the place he indicated, wondering what he kept in it.

“Now bring it back. And don’t drag it. Pick it up.”

I felt the veins bulge on my forehead as I struggled to carry out these instructions. I nearly made it back. Then the trunk slid from my grip, landing painfully on my left foot.

The master waited until I had stopped howling before he spoke again. “Why do you come to me?”

“Master, I come to you because I wish to see."

“Then why are your eyes open?”

“Master?”

I realized, at that moment, that the master’s eyes were closed. I understood that I was to close my own.

“Closer,” he commanded.

I felt the stir of movement. I heard the swish of the loose silk of his garment, and pictured his arm swinging back, fist clenched. Here it comes.

I intended to duck the blow, but something kept me in place, on my knees in front of him. What was that buzzing sound? It made me think of a bee, trapped behind glass. It came closer.

I felt burning pain as something pierced me at the third eye, like a drill bit. Immediately the girl was at my side, soothing my forehead with an ointment that smelled like yogurt.

When she left off, there was absolute stillness in the cabin. Then I heard the soft slap of water from the footbath.

I opened my eyes. There was no change in the scene. The black-haired girl squatted at the master’s feet, as before. I felt no surge of enlightenment. I did notice that one of the master’s eyes was now open. Above and between his closed eyelids, it fixed me with its blue light, cold and unwinking.

Voice of Lightning

I strike fast, but before I strike I probe for the best way through the air currents, sending down feeders you cannot see. I am drawn to oak trees, and to humans who have the quality of oak, hanging on to their foliage when other trees have shed theirs, standing tall, deep-rooted in earth, but always reaching for the sky. I fall in love, as humans and spirits do. The humans I love best will be stroked by my fire and can read my movements in energy fields. They will be challenged, as others are, to ground my power safely, because I sometimes forget that these soft animals are weak vessels that need to conduct my force instead of holding it to themselves.

Connect with me, and you take on my speed, my ability to focus energy – and the challenge of remaining grounded and of passing on my gifts.

Symbol Magnets:: Odin, Mercury and the Fox Girl

Symbols come alive for us through coincidence, which they help to generate. A symbol, in the original meaning of the Greek (symbolon) is that which is "thrown together" or "cast together". This is very close to the root meaning of "coincidence", which refers to things that "fall together". In a previous essay, I floated the term symbol magnets in an effort to describe the connecting and manifesting power that is involved here. It is a two- way process. When our minds are charged with a living symbol, we sometimes seem to attract related events. And because a true symbol has autonomous power, in the realm of the collective psyche, a symbol may burst into our ordinary reality.

Earlier peoples spoke of these things in a simpler language, as the interplay between humans and gods, spirits and elemental powers of nature. I confess to having sympathy for the older way of understanding, as did Jung, who invented the terms "archetype" and "psychoid" and "collective unconscious" in an effort to define these phenomena in a vocabulary acceptable to the modern scientific mind, yet loved to quote the old Latin tag omnia plena diis esse ("all things are full of gods").

A case in point: three incidents, played out over three weeks early in 2005, that I just unearthed in my journals:

1
I was called to work with a Danish man who had been physically crippled by a complex of diseases he developed after severe mercury poisoning. The collapse of his health contributed to the collapse of his marriage. Cynical, misogynist, reclusive - and fixedly atheist, denying the existence of the soul - he eventually sought to end his pain with a bottle of sleeping pills.

He needed a soul guide, and I made it my intention to call in a guide that he could perceive and trust and believe in.

Instantly Odin appeared, in a wide-brimmed hat and a flying garment, with his ravens flapping about him, swinging a staff. The figure of Odin was vividly real and unconsidered. His back was turned to me, because all his attention was on the suicide. The Dane had no hesitation in accepting Odin as his guide. Odin took him, not to any of the realms of the Aesir, but deep into the body of a primal goddess, under the waves. I was deeply moved to see this man's healing and rehab begin, in the deeps of the Divine Feminine, through a gate opened by one-eyed Odin.

Interesting - on the mythic plane - that his problems flowed from a toxic relationship with Mercury. The Romans identified Odin with Mercury. "Above all gods they worship Mercury, and count it no sin to win his favor on certain days by human sacrifice,” wrote Tacitus. It seemed the man who had suffered from mercury poisoning had healed his relationship with Mercury.


2
A week later, I met an editor for dinner at a seafood restaurant. During the meal he stabbed a lemon slice with a fork to season his fish - and shot a jet of lemon juice into my left eye, temporarily blinding me. He did not notice what happened.

I said, dabbing my eye with a napkin, "I wonder what it means when a supposedly friendly editor blinds you in the left eye?"

After a quick apology, he shot back without losing a beat, "It's the price Odin paid to Mimir for his wisdom".

I was impressed that his mind had gone straight to the myth of how Odin gave up an eye in order to drink from the well of prophecy and remembrance. After a mouthful of fish, the editor told me that some larger force must definitely have been at work with the lemon squirt, since he was trained to manage such things in a way that few of us are. “I know how to use a fork. I was trained as a sous-chef in Paris to get this kind of thing exactly right. I could not have shot you in the eye unless some powerful force was orchestrating this, a force such as Odin."


3


A week after the Odin squirt, I was on a plane bound to Minneapolis on the first leg of a trans-continental journey. The flight attendant seemed to have stepped out of the Otherworld. She was milk-white with reddish hair and moved like a fleet little woodland animal. I decided she might be an arctic fox - or the altered astral form of a fox, a fox's attempt to project a human double. When she served drinks I noticed that her left eye was brown while her right eye was blue. I told her she had magical eyes and looked like she had just come from Faeryland.

It's said that if your eyes are of different colors it can mean that they see into different worlds. This is a milder version of the Odin motif, where the seer loses one of his physical eyes - part of his ordinary vision - as the price of vision into the deeper world.

THE ODIN RUNE

I was wondering whether to post this sequence here, and played with writing a draft to see how it would come out. When I went to press the "Save Now" button, I hit "Publish Post" by mistake. I corrected this within a few minutes.

Not fast enough, however, to avoid being spotted in a way that suggests the movement of forces beyond the obvious - of Greater Trumps in play. When I next opened my email (still undecided about posting this essay) I found this message from my artist friend Steve Niner, in England: "Did you post a piece that involved Odin on your blog this morning or did I dream it? What ever way it was just what I needed."

I responded that it amazed me that he managed to catch a draft version of this piece during the three or four minutes it was visible.

Steve replied: "Shivery stuff, I have just started working with the runes. I stuck my hand in my rune bag and pulled out Ansuz which is Odin's rune I read the interpretation in the book I am working with ,it was highly pertinent. I then went to my computer looked at the blog reader and there is your Odin post. Had time to read that bit before my daughter kicked me off it to play. Did a drum journey later looking for a teacher to teach me magic guess who shows up. I am reading Dreamgates at the moment."

There's the Odin-Mercury connection again. Ansuz is also called the Messenger Rune, associated with all forms of communication.