How dreaming gets us through

In our current closed-down society, people who did not previously make much room in their lives for dreams are dreaming up a storm. Unused to sharing or working with dreams, they often shout out, “Why am I having this weird dream?” As a lifelong dreamer who devotes much of his time to teaching others how to dream, let me offer a few general observations: 

1.Dreams always tell us more than we already know. Don’t dismiss any dream, or tag it as “weird” or trivial, until you have recorded it and looked carefully at what is going on here.

2. "Weirdness" in dreams may be special effects your dream producers bring in to dramatize something you need to understand or act upon, such as the need for social distancing and self monitoring.

3Dreaming may be traveling; you make visits and you receive visitations. Your social life may be very restricted in ordinary life, but you can be as social as you like in your dreams. You can go to that farmer's market or that travel destination you've been missing. I dreamed I wass in Aruba the other night, lying back under a palupa on the white sand beach with the taste of sea salt and lime daiquiri on my lips. I did not feel downcast when I reurned to my body's housebound condition. I enjoyed the full after effects of a mini vacation and did not have to pay for a plane ticket or wait for bags.

4.You have intuitive radar that comes fully alive in dreams. You see things happening at a distance in time and space. You check out the possible future. You see unwanted events in the possible future you may be able to avoid if you clarify your dream information and take appropriate action. You see desirable future scenarios -your dream home, your dream partner, your dream job – that you may be able to manifest if you follow the road map your dream has given you.

5. In dreams, you can go to a night cinema where the feature films are made especially for you. You are not confined to sitting in the audience. You can step through the screen and become scriptwriter, director an star of your own life movies.

6. You can talk to the dead in your dreams. There is nothing “weird” or unnatural about contact with the deceased, especially in dreams. We meet them because they are still around, or because they come visiting, or because in our dream travels we go to places where they are alive. Sometimes they have guidance for us. Sometimes they need our help because they are stuck or confused, and may have been hurled into the afterlife without preparation or rituals of leave-taking. With so much death around us, this is a very good time to learn, with the deceased, that consciousness survives the death of the body and that life goes on in whatever world.

7. Dreaming, you have access to wiser sources than those available to the daily trivial mind: to the god/goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to a Greater Self. Your dreams are a voice of conscience and course correction, showing you how your current actions and attitudes appear to an objective, witness self. Dreams are a way for your true spiritual guides to get past the cynical, reductionist skeptic in your left brain and recall you to your bigger story.

8. Your dreams are a factory of images that can help you stay well or get well.  Your body believes in images. Find the right ones and you program the amazing pharmaceuticals factory inside you to pump out the right drugs, boosting your immune system.

9. You don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. Your most powerful dreaming may unfold in the twilight zone between sleep and awake. You may journey like the ancient shamans, hyper-awake. The scales may drop from your eyes so you see that the world around you is a forest of living symbols looking at you.

10.Active dreaming is a path of real magic. In my lexicon, true magic is what happens when we bring gifts from another world into this one. We do this when we remember our dreams and act to embody their energy and guidance in everyday life. And when we wake up to the fact that dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. Dreaming is about waking up to a deeper reality and deeper sources of meaning in our lives

To get good at dreaming, as with anything else, requires practice, practice, practice. Three things to do now:

* Keep a journal. Date each entry and give it a title. This is going to become the most important book on dreams you will ever read: your personal encyclopedia of symbols, our data log for “supernormal” phenomena like clairvoyance and precognition, a place where you dialog with your Self and your inner teachers, a workout for the writer and creator in you.

*Learn some of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. These include using the Nine Keys to Your Dreams explained in my book Conscious Dreaming, practicing the Dream Reentry technique, and learning to navigate by synchronicity, which is the dreamer’s way of operating 24/7/ You’ll find a short guide to my relevant books here. You may also want to check out my online video courses for The Shift Network

*Learn my Lightning Dreamwork technique, a fast, fun process by which we can share a dream or a personal story with a friend, give each other helpful feedback (without presuming to tell each other what our dreams or our lives mean) and help each other determine what action we should take to embody guidance and energy from the story.

Get to know your dreams better and you may find that if you still want to call them "weird" you will use the word in older sense. Though few of us remember its origin, weird is derived from Wyrd, which is a way of understanding how things in all the worlds are connected, and turn together. In the Scotland of my paternal ancestors, to be “weirdless” was to be unlucky or unfortunate in life. 

Photo: Under a palupa on Manchebo beach, Aruba, by RM

Dreaming into Egyptian Blue

 

 

After a murky sequence in my dreams one night, when I needed to avoid various dangers and distractions, I found myself lying at the edge of the ocean in marvelous gleaming morning sunlight. With my legs in the water, I enjoyed the waves lapping over my lower chest, and the warmth of the early sun, turning the whitecaps of the blue sea into gold.

    As I surfaced from this dream, I thought, What a perfectly simple and lovely image to linger in, for relaxation, cleansing and healing. So I stayed in bed, putting myself back into that gentle feast of color and rhythm. As I drifted in my conscious dream, a blue form separated from the blues of sea and sky. It moved like the finest silk and seemed to extend from shoulder-height into the sky. It seemed to me that it was some kind of pathway. I let myself join this blue light, and soon found myself enjoying wonderful kinesthetic sensations of flight. Soon I was winging over greenwoods, swooping low to enjoy the sights and smells close up. I was drawn to a town I did not recognize, where no one noticed me until a swarthy old man stared at me, his eyes fierce as a hawk. He beckoned me to a doorway where a beautiful younger woman - his daughter? - was waiting. Over the doorway hovered the energy form of an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. A new adventure was beckoning....

    This is a simple example of how Active Dreaming works in everyday practice. You pick an image from a dream you would like to explore, or simply stay with, and allow a new cycle of conscious dreaming to unfold. The blue of the energy path that appeared spontaneously and led me to the Egyptian door was very like the distinctive "Egyptian blue" - whose blue derived from copper oxides like malachite - that you see on scarabs, and hippo sculptures, and fertility statues, and on the painted skins of gods and New Dynasty pharaohs, and on the djed pillar of Osiris. And on ankhs. I have seen ankhs that were used as water vessels painted this color. The idea was as you drank from them - whether plain water or a potion infused with crushed petals of the blue lotus, an oneirogen - you would take vital life force into your body.

    In their dry country, the Egyptians dreamed the whole spectrum of blues. They prized lapis lazuli and azurite. They sought the origin of human life and purpose in a blue star from which gods descended (in some versions of the cosmogony) to Earth via the the Moon. In the Egyptian mind, blue (irtiu, khesbodj) is the color of heaven, of the primeval flood, life, rebirth, fertility and of the inundation that renews the land. A good color to dream on.

Drawing by Robert Moss

I Can Ride Dragons But I Can't Fly

 

The forest is green fire, bursting and thrusting with life.  Below the great tree where I am stretched out, the slope of the mountain drops in green splendor for miles, down to a river that is green and small as a grass snake from this height. A bright green vine as thick as my wrist bends in a loop between me and the sky. 
     My attention shivers. My cheek is on a pillow. My awareness is back in the body I left here, on the bed. Gray morning light comes through a narrow gap in the curtains above the bed. I smell bacon, and my inner dog is ready to go downstairs. But the tug of the green world is deeper. 
     I plunge back into that world. My body feels stronger and lighter, perfectly toned. I want to jump off the cliff and fly. I have done this so many times before, in other dreams. I will my wings to sprout from my shoulders again. This seems less successful than usual. While my body in the green world feels entirely physical, my wings seem flimsy and insubstantial, hardly more than a notion. This does not matter, surely.  When I take the jump, I’ll find myself flying. Flying in dreams is easy. All you have to do is fall, and fail to hit bottom.
    I am at the very edge of the precipice. My toes curl over the edge. I notice these toes are much longer than my regular toes, and can curl into a loop, like my regular fingers. Cool.  What else can this body do?
    I consider a diver’s stance, then spread my arms and start gently flapping.
    Stop, says an inner voice, a voice I have learned to listen to. Look at who you are.
    I pull back. Now I am outside and above the person at the edge of the cliff.  I see him back away from the edge. He is puzzled. He sniffs the air, searching for something he senses but cannot see. 
    Another hand reaches for him. There is a lovely woman under the tree, the slopes of her body arranged in such abandon that I feel sure they must have been making love before I interrupted. “Woman” is not quite right. They resemble humans, but they are much taller, with those prehensile feet. The male has little horns among his long dark hair. Not horns, exactly. The nubs of antlers. His tawny body is covered with fine light silky hair. Something sways behind him as he returns to the embrace of the female. Is it a tail?
    I am no longer observing. I am with him, in him, in his ritual of mating. He seems to be alone with his mate, yet I have no doubt this is a ritual, more than sex, more even than the love-making of two individuals. As he plunges deep in her body, I feel energy streaming from the roots of the great tree. And something more joins him – us – surging in at the base of the spine. The dragon is on him, and in us.
    Now we can fly, I tell myself.
    Again I hear the caution of an inner guide. This deer-man’s body is strong, and it can perform acrobatics beyond the human range. He can swing down the mountain face on vines, and leap from branch to branch. He can ride a thing like a dragon, the thing with which he is now bonded in another way. But he cannot fly. If I jumped this body over the precipice, it would probably be broken and destroyed on the rocks far below.
    I thought that in dreaming, people can fly, because we go outside the physical body. This is often true. But I am learning that in dreams we can take on other bodies, and that in dreams we may change worlds as well as states of consciousness. 
    Before you jump off a cliff, make sure you are in a body that is capable of flight. 

Book excerpt from Mysterious Realities by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing by Robert Moss

Your dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are leading somewhere else

What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set.
It gets more interesting. In dreams, you may check in to a parallel life you are leading somewhere else.
You may be swimming with seals, or looking for the selkie skin that was hidden from you. You might still be living with your ex, doing the things you would be doing if you had never broken up. You might be marching with those warriors in leather armor under the banner of a Bear Goddess. You might be running that bordello in the French Quarter in old New Orleans. You may be up on a high roof top, looking down on your present life in the perspective of the Double on the Balcony, your eternal witness.
When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream.
When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you.
Jung struggled for clarity on this, and found it late in life. He came to believe that we lead continuous lives in our dreams. Put another way, your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are living somewhere else, a life that goes on whether or not you are tuned to its channel. This is something you can dream on.
You get up in the middle of the night and go the bathroom. When you return to bed, you find the same dream is playing as you were dreaming before, but the action has moved along. A bathroom break may be the start of your awakening.
Sometimes a dream of this kind reaches to you from another realm like a giant fist, pulling you in and back. It was like that for me one night at Big Sur. I was in a bed overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my window open to catch the sea breeze and the marvelous rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocky shore.
In my dreams, I was far away, in Mongolia in a cruel winter, on the eve of World War II. I was engaged in a secret mission, to spy on a team of SS commandos who were seeking to capture the most powerful shamanic artifact in the Central Asia: the spirit banner of Genghis Khan. I stirred from this dream, thrilled and mystified. I might have made it my plan to reenter the dream to try to understand why I was in Mongolia in the 1930s while my body was on the California coast. But no effort on my part was required - unless I had wanted to resist going back.
Again and again, through the whole night, the drama played on. All my senses were engaged. Now in a dual or multiple state of consciousness, I could hear the Pacific breakers and turn my body on the bed, while fully present in the Mongolian adventure in a body that felt no less real. I could taste the blood from a horse's neck I was required to drink in order to survive that terrible winter, in a wilderness of snow. I could smell the rank fear of horses and men. I have no doubt I was there.

Art: René Magritte, "Faraway Looks" (1927)

Toilet dreams

“Shit is good!” The elderly Italian grocery store owner’s eyes twinkled as she bagged tomatoes and homemade pasta for me. “If you crap in your dreams, it means money.”

Her reading is an ancient one, still alive in many family traditions. Josefina had carried it with her from Sicily. The association between excrement and wealth isn’t silly, when we remember that gold and silver come from under the earth, the repository of night soil. One of the names of Hades, the Greek lord of the Underworld, is Ploutos (Roman Pluto) which means The Wealthy. 

Sometimes our dream producers make the link impossible to miss. I once dreamed I was on the potty and produced a gusher. What might have been an explosion of diarrhea was a great burst of liquid gold. I woke laughing, feeling a happy release and also a terrific sense of possibility.

As with any dream symbol, the excrement in your dream isn’t necessarily the same as in mine. A good guess, with many dreams of defecation, is that you are eliminating something that needs to come out of your body or your life. To “take a dump”, in a dream, may be to dump what you need to let go. When your feelings tell you that such dreams are positive, they may indicate effective cleansing and releasing, perhaps a return to good health. A bowel movement, in a dream, may herald or accompany a move beyond a blocked or stuck situation. We sometimes say, “I’m feeling constipated” as a metaphor for the sense that things just aren’t coming out of coming through as they should do.

A common variant of the poop dream is one in which we need to go but find ourselves doing it in public. Sometimes this reflects a need for privacy in the dreamer’s life. Sometimes it’s more about whether and when it’s okay to “let it go” in front of others. Guidance on that may come from the reactions of others inside the dream. If other people in the dream don’t seem to notice or mind, that may be telling you it’s okay to let it all out. Let’s remember that in some cultures, going in public was normal bathroom procedure.

Colloquial phrases involving shit or its synonyms may give us a clue to the meaning of a dream of this ilk. Relevant phrases that plop to mind include:

I’m pooped

The shit hit the fan

I’m in deep doodoo

Shit for brains

He/she is a real shit

That’s crap

On the shitlist

Time to shit or get off the pot

This dream theme has been actively discussed for as long as people have been dreaming and needing to go. Some of the best pages in the most famous dream book of the ancient world, the Oneirocritica (“Interpretation of Dreams”) by Artemidorus, are devoted to skatá(the Greek word for shit, from which we derive the term “scatological”). Though I am no fan of dream dictionaries, I have a soft spot for Artemidorus, because he was always careful to note that similar dreams mean very different things according to the varied circumstances of the dreamer, and he checked on incidents that followed a particular dream.

  If you see a lot of human shit in a public place, according to Artemidorus, you won’t be able to accomplish anything there. In general, it doesn’t bode well if someone is shitting on your head. But that depends. “I know of a man who dreamed that a rich friend was defecating over his head. That man received a fortune and was named the heir of his friend.” On the other hand, a man who dreamed he was “befouled with dung by a poor acquaintance” later suffered great damage from the person who shat on him in the dream.

Defecating while in bed is not a good thing in a dream, says Artemidorus; it could mean you’ll be bedridden. It could also mean that your relations with a spouse or partner are in trouble, since the bad has been defiled. On the other hand to defecate copiously while seated on a toilet means “good luck for all men”, including “the alleviation of many cares and all distress. For the body is lightest after it has relieved itself.” It’s also a happy event when you dream you relieve yourself this way at a place in nature, on a road or in a river. Watch out, however, if you dream you are pooping in a temple, a place of commerce, or a public street.

I’m not sure I would be happy if I dreamed that anyone was pooping on my head although some folk traditions maintain that having a bird shit on your head in physical life is a very good omen.

From the profane to the sacred isn't necessarily a long journey. I have noticed that many toilet dreams mark an important transition in the dream experience. They may carry the dreamer out of the dream - in order to pee in the batroom instead of the bed.Alternatively, they may move the dreamer into a deeper and sometimes even magical or mystical space. Here's report form my own journals of a toilet dream that carried me into the realm of the Sufi poets.

July 27, 2009

Dream

Your Beloved Is Calling

I woke at 3:00 AM today from the following dream:

I am at a conference center where they are setting up for lunch in the huge dining area. There are wonderful freshy baked loaves of bread on  fresh white tablecloths. There's a gathering in process that includes a lot of priests or ministers. Also present is an entrepreneur who made a lot of money developing an internet search engine.

 

I receive several messages, as I roam the place, that a Sufi poet has been calling. He wants to get through to a number of people who are here, but they have not been receiving his messages. I am planning to tell the search engine entrepreneur that he needs to develop a device that will alert people when a spiritual teacher is searching for them.

 

I go through the dining area to a men's room. Several of the ministers are washing up. I go into a stall for privacy and find writing inside the door. Instead of graffiti, it is a lovely poem about spiritual union. Go up to the rooftop. Your Beloved is calling.

 

I woke with a sense of delight, and recognition. I thought of Rumi, and also of his spiritual teacher, Shams of Tabriz. I went questing back through old journals, and found my chronicle of nocturnal encounters with figures that appeared to carry this tradition. Over the nights that followed, I found myself traveling to many locales - including a glorious Palace of the Winds - in contact with spiritual teachers.

Photo: from the  Israel Antiquities Authority showing a rare ancient toilet in Jerusalem discovered this year. It dates back more than 2,700 years to an era when private bathrooms were a luxury.The smooth, carved limestone toilet was found in a cabin that was part of a large mansion overlooking what is now the Old City. 

 

Your dreams are doorways for lucid adventure travel and healing

Dreams are real experiences and a fully remembered dream is its own interpretation. The meaning of a dream is inside the dream itself. We release it by learning to go back inside our dreams in a relaxed state. By learning how to reenter dreams, you will develop the ability to clarify messages about future events, resume contact with inner teachers, and resolve unfinished business. Through this method, you will place yourself in closer attunement with the creative source from which dream images flow.     
      As a natural side benefit, you will probably also find that you are increasingly able to embark on conscious dream journeys from a waking state, and retain awareness that you are dreaming as you move deeper into the dreamscape. You may indeed discover that dream reentry is a royal road to lucid dreaming: you start out lucid and stay that way.
      To understand this process, we need to get one thing clear: the dream you remember is not the dream itself. By the time you are fully awake, you have forgotten 90 percent, if not more, of your nocturnal adventures. A partner's love bite, a ruckus in the street, a child tickling your toes, the need to get to the office, can shoo away most of your remaining memories.By the time the editor in your waking mind has finished processing and tagging the scraps that are left, your dream memories may be quite remote from the dreams themselves. At best, they are souvenirs from a journey.
    Suppose you fly down to Rio and bring home a few snapshots of Sugarloaf Mountain and bathers in string bikinis on Copacabana beach. How much of your adventure is contained in the photos? Do they carry the smell of palm oil, the bittersweet tang of batida de limão, the slap of a tropical rainshower? Or the drama at Customs, the rippling laughter of the girls in the samba school, the dance of your nerve endings when you entered (or renewed) a romance that woke up all your senses? Of course not. However, as you study the pictures, you may find yourself sliding back into the fuller experience.
    Dream memories are like this. Even as snapshots, they are often unsatisfactory: out of focus, with key characters missing their faces, subject to multiple exposures and mess-ups in the dark room. But with practice, you can learn to use these blurred images as windows through which you can reenter your dreams, continue the adventure and bring back valuable gifts.
    Dream reentry requires two things: your ability to focus clearly on a remembered scene from your dream, and your ability to relax, screen out distractions, and allow your consciousness to flow back inside that scene.If there are scary things inside the dream you are nervous about confronting, or if you have difficulty relaxing into a flow of imagery, you may find dream reentry easier if you have a partner to talk you through the process, or the support of a whole circle.
    Shamanic drumming is an especially powerful tool for dream reentry, providing fuel and focus for the journey. Drumming enhances the possibility that you can invite a partner to enter your dream space with you to act as your ally and search for information you may have missed. I have made my own recording of shamanic drumming for dream reentry, "Wings for the Journey", now available for download.

WHY YOU WANT TO LEARN DREAM REENTRY

• You want to have more fun
• You need to move beyond fear and nightmare terrors
• You need to clarify the meaning of the dream – for example, to determine whether it is literal, symbolic or the experience of a separate reality
• You need specific information from the dream – for example, the exact time and place of a possible future event, or the full text of something you saw in a book or an inscription.
• You want to talk to someone inside the dream.
• You want to claim a relationship with a spiritual ally who appeared in the dream
• You want to try to change something in the dream.
• You want to bring through healing
• You want to get in touch with a part of yourself you encountered in the dream
• You want to enter creative flow and create with dream energy
• You want to use your dreams as portals to the larger reality.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

The Realtor's familiar slogan applies to the technique of dream reentry as well as to the property game. The easiest way for you to go back inside a dream is to hold your focus on the dream location. Your initial memories may be fuzzy but a single landmark - even a single shape or color - may be sufficient to enable you to shift your consciousness into a vivid and complex scene.
    Be open to possibility! The geography of the dreamworld is not that of MapQuest. In dreams, you may find yourself in familiar locales, including places from your past - Grandma's house, or your childhood home - that may or may not have changed. You may visit unfamiliar but realistic locations, often clues that your dream contains precognitive or other psychic material.
    Your dream location may prove to be in a parallel world where one of your parallel selves is leading a continuous life.  You may find yourself in scenes from a different historical epoch (past or future), in a mermaid cove or in lands where the dead are alive. You may fall into an astral slum or rise to cities or schools or palaces in the Imaginal Realm, where human imagination, in concert with higher intelligence, generates worlds.
    One of the purposes of dream reentry is establish where in the worlds you are. The typical dreamer, after waking, has no more idea where he spent the night than an amnesiac drunk.

THE BEST TIME FOR DREAM REENTRY

The best time to reenter a dream is often immediately after you have come out of it. By snuggling down in bed and rehearsing the postures of sleep, you may be able to slid back inside the dream space in a gentle and natural way. But you work schedule may not allow you to do this. And if your dream contains deeply disturbing material, you may need to wait until you have the resolution and resources to face that challenge on its own ground - which you will probably find is the sovereign remedy for nightmare terrors and frustrating dreams.
    There is no such thing as an "old" dream when it comes to choosing the portal for dream reentry. What matters is that the image that you choose should have real energy for you. I have seen people who had been missing their dreams for thirty years take the last dream they remembered - sometimes from childhood - and use it as the portal for a lucid shamanic journey, powered by drumming, with stunning results. The gifts sometimes extend to soul recovery, to bringing home the beautiful young dreamer who checked out of a life when the world got too cold and cruel, leaving the adult bereft of dreams.
     

Part of this text is adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.
    

Be Straight, Be Full, Be Ready: Directions from Emerson

I often read a page or two of Emerson before greeting the sun. For me, he is the wisest of American philosophers and the most practical, because his words create a stir in the spirit that is a wonderful incitement to action. He is the perennial enemy of hand-me-down systems of belief and self-limiting notions about what is possible in a life. When we are wandering lost in a fog of confusion in the low marshlands of group-think, he pipes the tune and shines the light that will get us back to the upward slopes of our life purpose. 

In one of the adventures in Active Dreaming that I lead, 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. 

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 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. 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 friend 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 told the young men at Harvard. "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.

Photo by RM