The dream that guided Jung to reach for a more general audience

 

 Near the end of his life, Jung finally managed to put his best and most original ideas in a form that was simple enough to reach a general audience, without diluting or dumbing anything down. He might not have done this except for a dream. After watching Jung's very human interviews with John Freeman for the BBC in 1959, the publisher of Aldus Books had a bright idea: why not ask Jung to write a book for a general audience?
     Jung's answer, when approached by Freeman, was a flat No. He was now in his 80s, and did not want to take the time that remained to him for this. Then Jung dreamed that he was standing in a public place and lecturing to a multitude of people who were not only listening with rapt attention but understood what he was saying. The dream changed his mind.
     Jung had said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, "All day long I have exciting ideas and thoughts. But I take up in my work only those to which my dreams direct me." Now he proved this, again, by embarking on the book that was published (after his death) as Man and His Symbols. He conceived it a collaborative effort and invited trusted colleagues like Marie-Louise von Franz to contribute chapters.
    His personal contribution was a long essay titled "Approaching the Unconscious" . The essay is, first and last, about dreams. He completed it just ten days before the start of his final illness, so this work may be called his last testament. It testifies, above all, to the primary importance of dreams in Jung's psychology and in his vision of human nature and evolution. Jung makes this ringing statement: "It is an age-old fact that God speaks, chiefly, through dreams and visions." 

Illustration "The Hiddem Door" RM+AI

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” - C.G. Jung, "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man". 1931 lecture.

Silver Wolf invites me to see how past life memories are selected

I am back in old journals, harvesting, collating, illustrating. This entry relates to a perennial question about the workings of anamnesis: how and why do memories of other lives surface in our present lives?

August 16, 2012

dream

Silver Wolf invites me to see how past life memories are selected

I am in a village of terraced houses, in Ireland or Britain a few centuries ago. I have come here to investigate my possible past life connections with a friend. This may be one of a number of excursions I have made overnight, to different landscapes in different times.
    I leave my friend in the village and walk a path towards the woods beyond the fields. The woods are lovely, deep and dark and inviting. But at the edge of the wildwood, something is moving. It is a black snake, slithering across the path, from right to left, at a diagonal. This snake is huge. When its head reaches the other side of the path, it straightens the body to move parallel to the path. I can now see at least twenty feet of its body, and more is coming.
   I hesitate. Though I don't think this snake is venomous, I'm not sure I want to get any closer. I am ready to turn back, when I see the head of a silver wolf among the shadows of the forest. The wolf is staring intently at me. I recognize a friend, and know it is safe, and maybe essential, to go forward.
   I step over the snake, as if it is merely a garden hose.
   At the instant I do this, I am transported to another level.
   The scene changes completely. I am now in some kind of vessel, like a spaceship or orbiting observation platform. Two men are working the control panels, under huge windows. One remains at his work. The other stands up quickly, to see who has entered their space. He is clearly very surprised to find me here, but also friendly and welcoming.
    I know, before words are exchanged, that this vessel is a "relay station" and that the work of its controllers is to supervise and help to select the past life memories that become accessible to people living on the Earth plane. I understand, in this moment, that it is very important that past life memories are meted out carefully, so that we are not overwhelmed by a rush of information and emotion that could bind or distract us in our present lives.

Feelings after the dream: Excited and full of active curiosity.

Reality check: I have again been studying our relations with personalities and dramas in other times, and how these can provide a context of meaning for current relationships and challenges. Silver Wolf is a name I gave to a native shaman who can appear as man or wolf and gave me indelible instruction on the nature of various aspects of the soul and what happens to them after death. Black snakes have sometimes featured in my dreams as important dwellers at the threshold, between different worlds as well as different states of consciousness. To gain entry to an earlier time and fulfill an assignment in Celtic lands that once seemed urgently important to me (in a lucid dream followed by a shamanic journey) I once had to move beyond a seething mass of black snakes.

Illustration: RM + AI

Calling the Storm God: Private Myths, Collective Dreams

I run into storm gods quite often: Zeus and Perkunas, Shango and the Thunderers.. In a dream report I disinterred from my 2020 journals, I am reconstructing a ritual to call on the power of a storm god feared and revered in the ancient Near East. As so often, the dream set me the task Jung called "amplification": tracking correspondences in mythology and literature. 

August 9, 2020

dream

Calling the Storm God 

I am holding an extraordinary stone. It is dark reddish and may be a meteorite. There is the hint of a figure or scene, maybe its natural contours. Its shape reminds me, oddly, of the foreleg of a bull. I want to set it up in its ancient stand. I examine some bits of metal that were used to anchor it. I ask two lovely young priestesses who are assisting me to bring me some wire, figuring that I can bind the object in place. Before they return I have worked out how to get it securely into its bronze base. Power will be generated when the right words are spoken and the right powers evoked.

I have found an ancient text - Mesopotamian or Hittite - of a hymn to the storm god. I have written a free version of the scholarly translations and feel it has real power to move things for the benefit of communities as well as individuals. I share this with the priestesses and they are excited. I am going to read my work aloud for the first time to them.

I consider how to explain my hymn to a broader audience. One of the priestesses has a collection of my previous writings including an essay titled "Words from Ur". Perhaps somethng in this vein.

Now I have the stone standing securely on its plinth, I decide where I will deliver the prayer. There are three doors in the wall before me. I open the middle door. There is a tremendous surge of energy, seeking form, in the sky. 

 

Feelings: keenly interested, excited

Amplification: I knew that a storm god (Hurrian Teshub, Hittite Tarhan) was very important for the Hittites. I was soon reading up on Iškur (Sumerian) or Adad (Akkadian), a Mesopotamian storm god. Adad’s name is said to be derived from the Canaanite Hadad. The root meaning of both names is "Thunderer". He was also called Rammanu, Thunderer, in Akkadian. A text dating from the reign of Ur-Ninurta characterizes Adad/Iškur as both threatening in his stormy rage and generally life-giving and benevolent [1]. 
     I would imagine that meteorites and thunderstones were widely regarded as symbols of the storm gods. Early Hittite inscriptions speak of them as “stars falling from the sky” and the Hittites supposedly worshipped sacred stones set up at many places. A Hittite king sent a meteorite dagger to Tutankhamun. 
    The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed in Egypt to reanimate the spirit of the dead. A distinctive tool was used – an adze with a bent handle resembling the foreleg of a bull. It has been suggested that the actual foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull may have been used to pump blood to revive a deceased pharaoh. The Egyptians called Ursa Major Msḫtjw, the Foreleg of the Bull .[2]
    It seems that statue magic throughout the ancient Near East involved similar arts, to import the spirit of a deity or ancestor into a statue or stone and then bring it alive.
    I looked for hymns to the Near Eastern storm gods and copied phrases that might be part of an invocation:

Thunderer 

Owner of the House of Abundance
and the House Where Prayers are Answered

Bull Rider|
who leashes and unleashes the Lion Dragon

Guardian of the Tablets

Lord of Divination

Bringer of rain from heaven and floods from underground [3]

By the Old Babylonian period Iškur/Adad was one of the great gods of the Babylonian pantheon with sanctuaries in many cities  He is "the bringer of plenty" in Enki and the World Order . In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta he causes a storm that makes wheat grow on a barren mountainside  Elsewhere his violence is featured. In the Old Babylonian version of the creation epic Atrahasis, "Adad was roaring in the clouds" as the Flood began. The deluge "bellowed like a bull" and the wind screamed like an eagle. 

Five years on: I note that the priestesses in my dream were modern Americans, perhaps an alert that storm gods will be heard again. 

Notes

1. Alberto Green writes that "On a tablet among the adab compositions from the time of Ur-Ninurta of Isin, Iskur is metaphorically described as a howling tempest with flashing bolts of lightning, a butting storm, and a great lion who makes all his enemies tremble, yet he is simultaneously revered as a benevolent lord and warden of heaven and earth who gives life to the land...In this important series of liturgical incantations dated to Ur III, Iskur is the son of Enlil. In addition to being called a lion, he is also represented as an enormous bull-cloud, booming his name across the sky. Here the Storm-god rains destructive hail rather than life-giving showers. He is lauded as the august bull and the great lion, mounting the seven storms like donkeys; he is also the roaring storm, thunder, and lightning. The mythic picture is that of the Storm-god Iskur galloping in his frightful war-chariot, drawn by his steeds, the lion, and the bull." - Alberto R. W. Green, The Storm God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2003.) p.54.

2. Gábor W. Nemes, “The mythological importance of the constellation Msḫtjw in mortuary representations until the end of the New Kingdom” Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenn vol. 13 (2020) pp. 1-61.

3. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd edition. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. 2005) p.784

4. ibid., p249.

Illustration: RM+AI

The Traveler

 

I can only keep up with him by becoming him. When I come home from our travels, I am not quite myself and no longer him. When we part company, I am left to pore over scraps of memory like the things I find in my pockets and on my phone after a regular plane trip: a boarding pass, a bus ticket, a foreign banknote, a scribbled love note, random photos of far-away cities and beaches and train stations.

It is now one of my ongoing undertakings to track the Traveler through my journal reports. Here he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different – mildly or radically – event track, or he is in another body in another time or another world.

Is the traveler sometimes in a different body in this world, like the kids in the Japanese film Your Name? Perhaps. I think back to the body swapping dream of many years ago when the Traveler tries on at least three different bodies – of a black athlete, a rich Republican country club type, and finally an older, eccentric scholar whose legs don’t work well, much like my current self.

I think of the dream in which I am dressing up in a blue satin ballgown, excited by the prospect of turning on my boyfriend. I wake wondering whether I have been in a woman’s body. This doesn’t feel quite right. My excitement in the dream is surely male arousal, within a man’s anatomy. Confused, I look out the window and see a tall black transvestite, gorgeously attired in a long blue satin ballgown, teetering down the steps on stiletto heels on the arm of her boyfriend

The moment of lucidity, in a sleep dream, may be the moment when the self that has been dormant in bed – or somewhere else altogether – catches up with the Traveler. It may be a moment of self-possession, of taking control of a vehicle that has been traveling under the direction of an autonomous self, like the captain of a ship coming back on board and taking over from a junior officer or crew member. However, the person in the wheelhouse may decline to give over control, and a sudden rebuff may result in falling out of the dream (for the person who wakes in the bed) and the Traveler’s disappearance from radar. So it could be like a horse bucking a would-be rider.

As I seek to track the Traveler, I watch the person who is writing these lines. I see him fumbling with his nautical analogy. I like the bucking horse analogy better, though we lose the notion that there may be a second rider. I am not going to play editor or critic. The writer’s attempt to model and understand what is happening in his many lives is part of his story, the one on which I will put the name we use in the ordinary world.

The Traveler is a multilingual word player. I play with words in English. The Traveler plays with words in many languages. One morning I was left with an unlikely phrase in French, on acccable par les hochements. This could be a newly-minted saying with the sense of “yessing someone to death”, or a commentary on the storm surge of Hurricane Irma, or both. Now I remember the Traveler’s effort to find the right words to greet Stalin at lunch in Ufa in the midst of World War II. He sought an edge of humor while trying to avoid getting his throat cut. He managed, in the Georgian language.

When I am the Traveler the journey often begins at a certain threshold, a gap between the worlds, in a twilight of the mind. I may find myself floating upwards. I roll over and as I do so I feel something pulling loose from my physical body. Lights flash at the top of my head and I find myself being drawn up into a cone of light, like a pyramid with an opening at the top. 

There are days when, flat on my back under a tree, I fall upwards into the bowl of the sky, like Rumi. There are nights when I feel I am about to blast off like a rocket, or be blown from the mouth of a cannon, through circles of red within black. Or I find myself stripping off, shedding the body like a snake skin, dropping it like an old overcoat. When the travels begin, I often find myself looking at geometric pattern. It may be a glowing energy grid. It may resemble the weave of a carpet, or the strands of a net.

 

You know when he tells you it's a redingote

 

I am often asked, of scenes that develop in lucid dreams and visions, "How do I know I'm not making it up?" Well of course I am in favor of making things up, of engaging in reality creation with the aid of imagination, that great faculty of soul. Nonetheless, I recognize that the skeptic in the cognitive brain needs to be appeased. Sometimes a bit of information unfamiliar to the dreamer that can later be verified serves that purpose, providing a sense of objectivity.

Early yesterday morning, in a half-dream state between sleep and awake, I found myself observing a fascinating series of events. I saw what at first looked like a giant golf ball rolling over sea mist towards the shore, where I stood on a sandy beach with dense jungle behind me.  As the ball got nearer, I saw it was a very small moon, with people singing as they rode it towards a reunion in the jungle. Intensely curious, I ran through the jungle, trying to get to the place where the moon riders would come down.

I came up behind a strapping man with a curling red beard, with a cane topped by a crystal ball, a top hat, and what I labeled in my journal a "frock coat". I knew he was a magus and that the meeting he was headed for was of huge importance. Soon he and his servant - who had a blue parrot on his shoulder - were whizzing over the undergrowth on their own magical transportation. I managed to get close enough to the magus to start picking up his thoughts. I stayed lucid and entirely resent to this adventure - while also aware of my body in bed - until the cats pulled me out by demanding breakfast yowls and thumps. 

Very early today, lying on my back in bed, I decided to reenter the scene, and seek the identity of the man in the frock coat, and see whether I could look in on the meeting with moon riders. I learned many things, including his name. At the point where I might have asked, "Am I making this up?" the word "redingote" came to me, in a clipped accent. Redingote? I wasn’t certain till I looked it up.

 

A redingote and a frock coat are both long coats worn by men in the nineteenth century, but differ in style, cut, and purpose. The word "redingote" derives from the English "riding coat." Fitted at the waist with a long, flared skirt, it could be double-breasted or single-breasted. It was worn for both riding or formal occasions. The frock coat, the mainstay of Victorian men's formal wear, usually double breasted and worn with a vest, was shorter (knee-length) also fitted but less waited and flared.

So, he wants me to know he is wearing a redingote, like a frock coat but not the same. Exquisite detail to which I do not normally have access soothes the skeptic in me, though it does not silence him. He hisses, “You must have read that word in Thackeray when you were a student”. Perhaps. But it was long gone from memory if so, and I am pretty sure that the voice that gave it to me was not speaking from the bargain basement of my personal subconscious. After identifying and speaking with some of them, I am certain that the people in that moon-assisted gathering are not part of me at all except in the sense of the old Latin tag attributed to Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, "I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me"

Dream bilocation

 

Do you experience being in two (or more) dreams at the same time? I am not talking about the experience of dream-within-dream (though that is no less interesting) but about being conscious that you are involved in two (or more) unfolding and distinct dream situations at the same time. You may or may not be aware of your dormant body in the bed while engaged in these other realities.

We may find it hard to sustain dual (or multiple) consciousness in dreamtime. As we leave the dreams, our waking editor - who likes linear order - may try to turn them into a single narrative, blurring our memory and understanding of what was going on.

The phenomenon is important. Growing the ability to sustain consciousness in two or more dream situations at the same time is excellent practice for becoming a conscious citizen of the multiverse.

I had an indelible experience of this when I was teaching at the Esalen Institute in California., which I titled “Mysteries of Ulan Bator”. I was caught up in twin adventures in Mongolia, one in the 1930s (involving a race to locate the spirit banner of Genghis Khan), the other in a possible or parallel future, where I am arriving in the Mongolian capital to take part in a conference on shamanism. At the same time, I am aware of my body in the bed and the roll of the Pacific breakers under my windows in the Big House.

This was a case, at the least, of trilocation.  I was in three different times and at two different places. And while seesawing between my room at Big Sur and Mongolia in the past and possible future, I was sometimes able to observe all three situations. 

In his notes in The Unknown Reality (a Seth book) Rob Butts, Jane Roberts' husband and amanuensis, writes that he was amazed when he first found himself in two dream situations simultaneously. His astonishment deepened when he discovered that his experience  were trumped by those of others in their circle, notably Sue Watkins, who claimed to be able to sustain consciousness of many personalities and their dramas at the same time, in dreaming.

When you become aware that you are dreaming, inside a dream, you may find that you are practicing a simple form of bilocation, at least while you remain lucid. Your dream self is out there, near or far, while you are also aware of your dormant body, alive and breathing, and its physical environment.

I know that bilocation can be accomplished in states of waking dream. I think of the evening when I was drumming for a shamanic circle on a mountain in the Adirondacks when a hawk that was visible and palpable only to me slapped my shoulder. The hawk encouraged me to leave my body, traveling with part of my consciousness, for a reunion with an important mentor, an arendiwanen or woman of power who was Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people centuries ago. While I traveled to meet her. enough of my mind remained with my body in the room for me to be able to continue to drum for the group and to watch over its physical and psychic wellbeing.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

 

On Spiritual Enthronement, or Fusion with an Aspect of the Higher Self

 

Plotinus said that our most important tutelary spirit is the self on a level above the one we are on. I have found this to be true. I think of this self as my double on the balcony, because in half-dream states I have encountered him on a high roof terrace, a vantage point from which it is possible to find patterns in the confusion of life below and approach life choices with detachment and even a sense of divine comedy.
      I meet this life teacher in interior dialogues, above all, once again, in the half-dream state that researchers call hypnagogia but is more elegantly described as dorveille in Old French, dormiveglia in curent Italian. I feel that at a tremendous turning point in my life, our minds and energies merged.
      Let me try to make a general obseravtion before I turn this discussion over to the record of a conversation I made many years ago. . 
     As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with a higher self and now progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

    “Take heart. I am with you always. I know you better than you know yourself.” This was the opening of communication with an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two.”
     This was the essence of communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995. Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify, and apply in ordinary reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers. What was coming through now was direct knowledge.
     “Your mind on my purpose.”
      That was familiar language, the way this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self that was no stranger gave me some very clear information:

    "When fusion takes place between a focus personality and the Higher Self - that is to say, the control personality on the plane directly above the focus personality -the result is a step forward in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.

    "This progression has taken humans from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects — to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane. Indeed, from this point of view, you are attending the emergence of a new species.Your physical equipment imposes limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of physiological change — in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of cells, and, naturally, in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher, clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise on the planes."

       This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years, I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer than your jugular vein.”

Text adapted from "The Double on the Balcony", chapter 31 of The Boy Who Died and CameBack: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Path to the Higher Self" by Robert Moss

 

 

Cosmos of the Makiritare Dream Shamans

 

In the origin story of the Makiritare (or Yekuana), a dreaming people of Venezuela, there was chaos and suffering in the world after the departure of Wanadi, a primordial being, before the dream shamans arose. People ceased to have direct contact with the other world, the realms where the akato (soul) travels and the masters of animals dwell. They could no longer rescue souls of the living or send souls of the dead to the right place. Without dreams, they were helpless in a world of illusion, trapped in delusions of the day and manipulations of other beings. Rescue could only come through the journey of a dream shaman who could reenter the invisible world and change things there and bring home the souls trapped in illusory realities.

Medatia is the one who turned himself into a dream shaman. He traveled to seven worlds beyond this one and brought skills and insight from all of them. He could then travel to the houses of the spirits and the animals – even the house of Odosha, the Dark One – and retrieve the people held captive there. At one point in his journey through Upper Worlds, he had to leave his second body dead in a lake, while a guide like a huge humanoid blue butterfly helped him to rise in another body. There are lots of anacondas in the story, though not in the picture.

 

Source: Marc de Civrieux, “Medatia: A Makiritare Shaman’s Tale”, translated by David M. Guss in The Language of the Birds ed Guss )San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985) 55-75

Images: (top) Cosmos of the Makiritare Shaman (bottom) "Lake in the Sky" by Robert Moss

 

 

So You Want a Dream Interpreter

 

If you want someone to interpret your dream, make sure they can tell it to you before you tell them.
       A Turkish friend recalls that her grandmother used to take her dreams to a Şeyh (shaykh) of the Halveti Ussaki Sufi order for interpretation. On one occasion, the Şeyh greeted her by telling her the essential content of her dream before she had told him the dream. She was shocked, but also convinced that the Sufi master was the right interpreter, if he could find a dream before she gave it to him.
       This kind of thing is not unusual in cultures where the practice of dreaming is still strong. That the best dream interpreter is one who can tell you your dream before you tell it to him is a sound principle, when you think about it, because it suggests that such a person has great intuitive abilities, and maybe very useful connections on the other side of ordinary reality, and perhaps the ability to dive into the dream world - or at least your own energy field - at will. I have written about the practices of a West African tribe who believe you can only trust interpreters if they can tell you your dream before you tell them. 
      I have also suggested that Nebuchadnezzar was operating by the same principle when he challenged all the dream interpreters to tell him a dream he claimed to have forgotten. [1] In a society that valued dreams highly and had advanced dream practices, I'll bet the king had not really forgotten his dream, but rather wanted to put the supposed dream experts through their paces. Daniel, famously, was able to access the king's dream and tell it to him because he had powerful assistance; he called on his God.
    Let's be clear. This is not a pitch for dream interpretation. We want to help each other to claim the power of our own dreams. We do that by offering commentary by saying "if it were my dream", recognizing our own projections and encouraging the dreamer to accept or reject feedback according to their own instincts. When we are able to enter another person's dreamspace - as shamanic dreamers learn to do, with permission - we can say, "in my dream of your dream," again leaving final decisions about the dream to the dreamer.
     If you are going to look for a dream interpreter nonetheless, look for someone who can find your dream before you tell them what's in it - or travel into your dreamspace, at your invitation, to bring back the full content and meaning of your experience,or call on a guide who knows. 

1.See my book The Secret History of Dreaming