Spiral path

The spiral turns up in many ways, from the double helix of DNA, to Celtic patterns on a magical dress, to a rickety old wooden spiral staircase in a dream that may become a golden road to the sky.
    One of my favorite ways of embarking on a journey to the Upper World is to picture moving up a spiral staircase. When I returned from a trip to Ireland some thirty years ago, it was the pattern of the double spiral that I had seen on a guardian stone at Newgrange that was the portal for the big night journey that took me to the ancient healer of indigenous American tradition that I call Island Woman.
    The intercoiling serpents of the caduceus are a double spiral; the single serpent coiled around the staff of Asklepios is a single spiral. Surely Jacob's ladder, in the great night vision of Bethel, was a spiral.   
    The spiral turns on the ceiling and walls of the Hypogeum of Malta and spins on great stone screens from the Goddess temple of Taxien.
   "The spiral is the supreme symbol of evolution. Combining cycle and line, it epitomizes entrainment plus change, it replicates an old movement yet drives somewhere new," writes Katya Walter in The Tao of Chaos. "The spiral spins the cosmos together and knits us into being."
     I wrote a poem in which the double spiral as the Eyes of the Goddess, holding the codes of birth and death, creation and dissolution. I wrote it after returning in a visionary journey to the great temple-tomb of Newgrange:

The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape

And shows me the map in the gateway stone:

Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;

Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;

A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.

I am here to practice the art of rebirthing. 

     I painted a double spiral on the drum I use to power journeys between the worlds. 

     In our life journeys, it is desirable to put ourselves on the spiral path, so that when life loops back - as it seems to do - to familiar crossroads and challenges - we are not bound to the dumb wheel of repetition, but are able to view a situation we have encountered before from a higher level of awareness, and so make better choices.

The full text of "Eyes of the Goddess" is in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Exclesior Editions/SUNY Press.

Photo: Spiral way in Latvia by RM.

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

The dream holds true in half the total universe

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observed that "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."

   That “direct personal communion" has been conducted through dreams and visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming in the broader sense understood by our ancestors and by active dreamers in all cultures. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins.
   In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: "The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, Frederic Myers, James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."
   For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness.
   In Principles of Psychology, James offers these interesting reflections on the orders of reality we may enter in dreams, and why dreaming is our mode of experiencing half the "total universe":

The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the spiritual world.

And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half. 

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If James is correct, then if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.

What causes dream drought

You hear it everywhere. "I don't remember my dreams", or even "I don't dream" (which only means "I don't remember" or, "I don't want to remember" since everyone dreams in three or four cycles, at a minimum, every night). You hear it from people who have no inner practice. You also hear it from people who may spend many hours a week in meditation, yoga or shamanic journeying but have no current relationship with the spontaneous gifts of the night, which can be deep and rich and a corrective to the control freak in the ego.
    A dream drought is recognized by dreaming peoples as a serious condition, for an individual or a community. The Iroquois say that if you have lost your dreams, it is because you have lost a vital part of your soul, the dreamer in you. A society that has lost its dreams risks falling into the Dark Times, because it has lost its primary connection with the spirit world, and is in danger of forgetting the origins and purpose of human life.
    There are four main reasons for the dream drought in many modern lives:

1. Bad habits.

The rhythms and routines of a typical urban life simply don’t support dream recall. Too often, we are jolted awake by alarm clocks – or bed mates, or kids who need to get to school – and stumble out into the world, fueled with caffeine, to try to get through our rounds of deadlines and obligations.

2. Fear and regret. 

We run away from our dreams because we think they might be telling us something we don’t want to hear – about the dark side of ourselves, or trouble or illness ahead – missing advisories that could help us do better,
Alternatively, we dream of something wonderful .But when we wake up we tell ourselves we can’t manifest what we enjoyed in our dreams. So we kiss off the dreams, forgetting that if we dream it we may be able to do it.

3. Artificial sleep cycles. 

Very often our concept of a good night’s sleep is at odds with our dreams. We are told we need to spend seven or eight hours each night in uninterrupted sleep. This idea would have amazed our ancestors. Before the advent of artificial lighting most humans experienced “segmented sleep” divided into at least two distinct cycles “Consolidated sleep”, as we experience it today, isn’t natural and does not support dreaming.

4. Lack of social rewards and encouragement.

Until recently, we have lacked a method of dream sharing that encourages people to remember and tell their dreams. The Lightning Dreamwork process, a signature technique of Active Dreaming that I first made public in 2000, gives us what has been lacking: a way to share dreams that is fast and fun, generates helpful and non-authoritarian feedback, and encourages the dreamer to take action to embody creative and healing energy and navigational guidance from the dream. Wherever this is practiced, people have positive incentives to bring a dream to the breakfast table, the coffee shop, or a quiet corner of the workplace. They feel rewarded and celebrated, and they don't want to miss out on the fun!

How to break a dream drought: Start here.

Image: Photo by Thomas Castelazo via Wikipedia Commons

What is your rescue story?

A rescue story is one that can buck you up and give you strength and courage, or simply warm smiles, when you need those things.  It's a story that can get you out from under a black cloud of despair, and move you beyond the belief that you're not good enough, or worthy enough, or that the world is cold and cruel.

    There are days in our lives when all of us need to be rescued by a story of this kind.  I asked members of one of my Active Dreaming circles to identify their own rescue stories. Among those offered:

- My first boyfriend kissing me so hard he put hickeys all over my neck and then sat with me for an hour with an ice-pack trying to make them go away so my mom wouldn't notice.

- leaning into the breeze on a cliff above the sea in Hawaii

- giving birth to my first child

- holding a humming bird in the palm of my hand

- seeing the sun shine at midnight, in a dream of healing and initiation

- with Grandpa in a laundromat when he magicked a gold ring out of one of the machines and gave it to me

- having a close-up encounter with my own Death, and coming back with the knowledge that Death is my teacher, not my enemy

Sometimes we can borrow a story others have told, and find courage or laughter within it. When things seem really bad, I often think of Viktor Frankl, reduced to a walking skeleton at Auschwitz, growing a dream of a future world where Hitler was a nightmare of the past, in which - liberated and respected - he saw himself giving lectures on the psychology of the concentration camps. 
    As he recounts in Man's Search for Meaning, one of the essential books of the 20th century, Frankl grew that dream so strong in his imagination, in the midst of constant terror, that he found the strength to survive and was eventually able to manifest his vision. That's a rescue story.

Art: "The Rescue" by Honoré Daumier

There is one direction in which space is open to us

Champlain Islands, Vermont

The sun rises from behind the mountains, and golden light bursts over the lake. Though the analogy is too pedestrian for the glory of this moment, it seems to me that an immense light bulb has come on, impossible to miss yet difficult to look at head-on. 

    The moment before I walked barefoot across the wet grass to wait for the sun by the shore, I was rereading lines from Emerson that give exact shape to the sense of illumination and direction that is now with me: 

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. 

    This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him, and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call.

This passage, from Emerson's Spiritual Laws, gives vital navigational guidance for our life journeys. Every word is as precise as a compass bearing. To read this passage deeply and take it to heart is to turn on the light in a darkened room, or put the sun in the sky.

    The talent is the call. When we follow our soul's calling, and give ourselves to the work, the life Work that is ours and no other's, our gifts are multiplied, because we draw to us supporting powers from the unseen, starting with our own creative genius. 

    There is one direction in which space is open to us. This explains why, when we are unsure of or uncommitted to our calling, we find blocks and opposition placed in our paths, doors slammed in our faces, savage reversals of fortune or of health that compel us to ask what we are doing in our lives. Such obstruction isn't random, and it's about more than toughening us up. Dead ends and adversity, repeated often enough, can make us aware that we've been following the wrong charts. Knowing that we have been misdirected gives us the chance to find our true direction. 

    On that side all obstruction is taken away. When we follow the soul's direction, the way ahead is open, and wind and water flow with us. We "sweep serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea." We draw new allies, events and resources to us. Chance encounters and benign coincidence support us and ease our passage in ways that are inexplicable to those from whom the spiritual laws of human existence are hidden.

    What we now deliver in our world is unique, yet it springs from the mode in which the general soul incarnates in us. We draw from "that age-long memoried self that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest", as Yeats wrote, thrillingly, in The Trembling of the Veil. The poet added that "genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.." Yes, but Emerson arouses us to the understanding that the flash of genius can become a steady beacon for a voyage in which the mixed crew of personalities that compose the self are willing to work the ropes together, because the helmsman is unerring.

     We have no rival when we follow our one direction and live as creators. To be a creator is to bring something new into the world, the thing only we can give.

     Each of us has all of the power to do something unique, and no one has any other call. Ah.
     As I write this line, releasing it from gender to become fully the property of all, the sun calls me, laying a path of light clear across the inland sea and through my window, so it shines before me. My pencil, on the table, glows in this brilliant morning light silently inviting me to endless exertion with the talent I am given, the kind of exertion that is no sweat because it is the soul's delight.

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

Photo: Sunrise on Lake Champlain by RM

Making Big Magic: Re-reading Elizabeth Gilbert

What a deliciously good book is Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. Her insistence that ideas are out there looking for the right people to carry and create with them matches the ancient wisdom of Aborigines that the Big stories are hunting the people who will tell them. I love her account of how, when she put aside the idea for a Brazilian "jungle book", it jumped, with specific characters and plot themes, to another wonderful writer, the novelist Ann Patchett, who brought it through in State of Wonder.
    I especially like her recognition that genius is not something a person is, but a greater creative spirit who will infuse and inspire us when we are available. That is the whole theme of the last chapter of my own ConsciousDreaming, and to operate with this awareness is to enter the heart of creative action. We miss the real meaning of genius. The Romans never said that a person was a genius. They said that a person had a genius, a tutelary spirit that brought them greater creative gifts. The Latin word "genius" is related to gignere, which means to engender or "beget". It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life. The Romans believed that a person's genius rejoices in good living, in laughter, in healthy sex, in having fun. Forget to play, and you are not working with your genius, for whom play is the only thing in mortal affairs worth taking seriously.
    Gilbert reminds us that for the Greeks the highest state of bliss is eudaimonia, being “good-daemoned”.
    Later she makes practical use of Einstein’s practice of “combinatory play”. To release your best in your primary field, play around in a lesser (for you) field where consequences are unimportant. On is way to a discovery, Einstein would pick up his violin and play a sonata or two.
    When it comes to negative thoughts, Gilbert recommends, act like a hostage negotiator. “Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath: calmly, but firmly. Most of all, never back down…The life you are negotiating to save, after all, is your own.”
     She borrows wonderful advice from W.C. Fields: “It ain’t what you’re called, it’s what you answer to.”
     She invites us to choose the trickster in each of us over the martyr.
     And then there is her story of the poet Ruth Stone, who wrote

Poems came to me
As if from far away.
I would feel them coming,
I would rush into the house,
Looking for paper and pencil.
It had to be quick,
For they passed through me
And were gone forever.

- Ruth Stone, "Fragrance",in her last collection What Love Comes To

As a poet myself, I feel for Ruth Stone, because thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, Stone's mode of chasing poems like runaway horses is now famous, but few have read the poet herself or even remember her name. It's well worth seeking out her work and noticing, along the way, how she rose above a dark river of grief and pain, especially after her second husband (also a poet) hanged himself from a door in the family home.
    There are delicious further revelations in Gilbert's account of how Stone caught her poems. When a poem got away from her, she felt it galloping away, "searching for another poet". Then sometimes she would manage to grab an escaping poem by the tail, and would feel herself pulling it back. "In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first - backward, but otherwise intact."
    Many of us dreamers know exactly how that works, as we pull back dreams by the tail as they run away. How many of the dreams that escape go searching for another dreamer?

Top image: Winged genius in the Louvre