Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Timeless Meetings of Minds




If you subscribe to the tired old misconception that dreaming is "unscientific", listen to Judy B. Gardiner: "My dreams led to accurate explanations of geology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, paleoanthropology, neurophysiology and other areas of study in which I was not schooled." I had the great pleasure today of interviewing Judy for my radio show. When I asked her for an example of how dreams had put her on the track of specific scientific knowledge, she recounted a dream in which an astronomer friend who had passed over mentored her in exact detail on the workings of the optic nerve, leading her to much information that was previously unknown to her.

Judy Gardiner is a writer and dream explorer who left a successful corporate life to pursue the practice and understanding of what she has come to call "cosmic dreaming", an approach that values the transpersonal and spiritual aspects of dreams and their ability to introduce us to a state of "timelessness" in which knowledge of past and future and of many dimensions are instantly accessible. Judy says, "I have found that cosmic dreaming transmits a direct experience of self and world as participants in a totality and that all dreamers possess the potential for this type of dreaming."

Judy worked for many years with Dr Montague Ullman, the renowned psychiatrist, neurologist, parapsychologist and pioneer of modern dream research. Monte took dreamwork out of the consulting room and into the community in ways that laid the foundations of the contemporary dreamwork movement and I consider him one of the liberators of the modern imagination. Monte's life odyssey was greatly influenced by an adolescent experiment in communicating with the spirits in which he and his teen friends succeeded in producing seance phenomena featuring a discarnate entity who called himself "Dr Bindelof". While maintaining some skepticism about whether Bindelof was an individual spirit or some other energy, Ullman noted some sixty years later that this early encounter with the paranormal was "profoundly transformative" and "the beginning of a journey of exploration into the many ways...events, lumped together as paranormal, impinge upon our lives." [1]

Monte Ullman passed in June 2008. Given their shared interest in the transpersonal and the depth of their experience together, I was not surprised to sense, during my conversation with Judy, that Monte was not far away. She spoke of the many ways in which she has felt his presence and his effort to communicate his continued work in his present reality, at home in the "implicate order", a term he borrowed from physicist David Bohm and used in a brave effort to sketch a new "abode" for the dream late in his life [2]
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"Monte sends me songs and poems," Judy said. "When I pull out the words, after waking, they are exactly right for me." In her dreams of Monte, he is often bent on sharing his growing understanding of reality and bringing forward the work they engaged in together, which took shape as the marriage of science and spirituality. "I dreamed I had to meet Monte on the Moon in two minutes, " Judy told me. "He used to talk about squaring somethings - one of his favorite expressions - and other images of twos appeared in this dream. Notably, there were two physicists with him, which he loved, because he was always seeking the right physicist to dialogue with." Waking, and wondering how to pursue the dream, her eye fell on a book from Monte's library titled Einstein's Moon. Opening it at random, she was immediately able to identify the two scientists from Monte's Moon (Niels Bohr and Einstein).
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Sometimes, Judy went on, she feels Monte's hand in computer anomalies. Struggling to understand and confirm the message of one dream involving Monte, she turned on her computer and gaped at the missing icons on the screen when it lit up. "I have about sixty icons on my desktop. They had all vanished, except for a single icon, a link to a video clip of Monte, the only video in which he was speaking" There seemed to be no doubt that Monte was at play here, in the interspace and the internet. "I always told him he would have made a terrific stand-up comic," Judy reminisced.
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Our discussion flowed into some of my favorite tidepools. We talked about that phenomenon Yeats described as the "mingling of minds", in which we find - when we give our best to a project or course of study - that we attract the active interest and contributions of other intelligences, including those of past masters in our field. We talked about the blessing of knowing that our loved ones, and other minds, are still accessible after the death of the body, and may be progressing to higher and deeper levels of exploration and accomplishment. We discussed how, as we awaken to the many levels of dreaming and our ability to pierce the veils of consensual reality while wide awake, we can find ourselves at home in a spacious NOW that Judy likes to call the "timelessness".
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REFERENCES
1. Montague Ullman, "The Bindelof Story, Part IV: Personal Life Impact" in Exceptional Human Experience vol. 13, no. 1 (june, 1995). available online at http://siivola.org/monte/index.html
2. Montague Ullman, "The Dream: In Search of a New Abode", presentation to the 23rd conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams", July 22, 2006.


"Clues to Immortality", Robert's interview with Judy B. Gardiner, airs on http://www.healthylife.net/ on Tuesday, September 8 from 12 noon-1:00 pm Eastern, 9:00-10:00 am Pacific.

2 comments:

  1. I really like the kind of practical dreamwork described in this article. This stuff really works and we should remember to use it more often.

    Recently I used bibliomancy to help me in a car purchase. I had been looking for a few months and was completely fed-up with the process so I decided I was going to buy something that very day and just get it done. I raised a prayer for guidance, opened the dictionary and randomly put my finger down on the page. I did this 3 times.

    The first word my finger landed on was 'chariot'. < The word "chariot" comes from Latin carrus. "A chariot of triumph was called a car" >! I thought OK, go for it and get the very best one.

    The second word was 'grease'. One of the definitions was: <"Slang: Something, such as money or influence, that facilitates the attainment of an object or a desire: e.g. accepted some grease to fix the outcome of the race."> I thought: Oh rats! I guess I am going to have to pay up for it.

    The third word was 'far': Definition: <"not close or near."> I thought: I guess I should plan on some travel to get the car.

    I had a particular late model used car in mind that I had targeted as my favorite but had felt it was too expensive and I had not been able to find the exact color and features I wanted. The red color I wanted was a little rare.

    I decided I would start by calling an out of town dealership that I had previously dealt with to check if they had one. While I was waiting for this dealership to return my call, a new call came in from a dealership in Minneapolis (I live in Wisconsin) They had my number as a result of an ebay inquiry I had made during my prolonged search. The salesman announced that The EXACT car I had been seeking for the past 3 months had just rolled onto their lot.

    Because of the bibliomancy guidance I committed to buying it on the spot; agreed to paying full price and drove my old car up to Minneapolis to buy it the following week.

    This is the coolest car I ever had. I just love it!

    **
    Amazingly, while I was writing this comment the car title was delivered to my door by Fed Ex.

    Wow!

    Karen Dreamrider

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  2. Hey Dreamrider - I'm delighted by your account of how the dictionary game supported and guided your successful quest for the cool new car. The Fedex man turning up with the title just as you were posting has that distinctive Hermes touch (I'm not talking about scarves :-) and brings confirmation that there are "things that like to happen together."

    Even better than bibliomancy, I like the operations of that benign bookish daimon that Arthur Koestler called the Library Angel and I think of as the shelf elf - that factor that makes books appear and disappear in ways that have nothing much to do with our conscious planning. I sense his hand in tghe flight of a copy of my book "Conscious Dreaming" off the shelf of a bookstore in Colorado many years ago. It struck a man who was looking for something else in the third eye. Literally struk by this unusual book behavior, he purchased he book and then invited me to Madison. Wisconsin to lead my first workshop in shamanic dreaming there, back in 1997...

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