Riding Inside the Tiger

 

I teach and learn by sharing stories and - especially when it comes to dreaming - I don't want to hear from educators and experts who don't share their personal experiences. In this respect Namkhai Norbu does not disappoint. Especially in his book on Dzogchen, The Crystal and the Way of Light (even more than in his book on dream yoga) he shares memorable dream experiences.
     The simplest and most endearing comes from very early in his life. When he was quite small, he dreamed many times that he was riding inside the belly of a roaring beast he thought must be a tiger. In those days no motor car had ever been seen in his remote part of Tibet. When he encountered automobiles years later, he realized what his dreams had prepared him for. I am so charmed by this tale that I have turned it into a drawing. 

When the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear 

Namkhai’s account of his dream education suggests a modification in a well-known maxim. It’s not just that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s also: when the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear.
     Aged sixteen, as a student teacher in China, Namkhai dreamed he met a very old man he knew to be a master. The master lived in a white Chinese-style cement house; the name Padmasambhava was written in Tibetan over the dor. The master chanted a mantra of Padmasambhava. Then he instructed Namkhai to go round the house to a great rock and look for the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave, he would find eight natural mandalas. The dreamer’s father appeared and chanted the Prajnaparamita sutra. Namkhai joined in chanting the sutra and they walked round the inside of the cave together. He could see the edges of the mandalas but not their full form before he woke up.
     A year later, back in Tibet, Namkhai heard a visitor talk to his father about an extraordinary old man who was living in a village of white Chinese-style houses in the region. He felt strongly this was the old man from his dream. Reminding his father of the dream, he asked if they could visit the old man in the white house. They set off on horseback and rode for four days. They came to a vialge of white concrete Chinese-style houses and knew the master’s house because mantra of Padmasambhava was over the door. The old man was Chamchun Dorje, a Dzogchen master; he became Namkhai’s primary teacher.[1]     

When you wake with a dream in your hand 

“What if you slept,” Coleridge wrote, famously, “And what if in your sleep you dreamed and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
and what if when you awoke you had that flower in your hand, ah, what then?”
     Coleridge’s question was answered for Namkhai in his early dream education. He learned that a certain kind of dream can spill over into the world. He woke with something he had dreamed in his hand.
     One of his uncles was renowned as a tertön, a "treasure revealer" of hidden texts that sometimes appeared as tiny scrolls in unusual places, apparently transmitted across generations by ancient masters. While staying with his uncle in a remote area, Namkhai dreamed he was visited by a dakini.
     She gave him a small scroll of paper containing a sacred text. She said this was very important and that on waking he should give it to his uncle. In the dream he knew he was dreaming. He gripped the scroll tightly in one fist and wrapped the other around it. It was not permitted to disturb his uncle until after his morning rituals, so he drifted off still with his fists clamped together.
     Waking at dawn, he opened his hand and found there really was a tiny scroll within it. He was too excited to wait. He woke up his uncle and presented the scroll. His uncle took it and said matter-of-factly, “Thank you, I expecting this” as if there had been a routine delivery at the door. [2]  

When you are called to travel to a deceased master 

When he was living and teaching in Italy, Namkhai’s guru, Chamchun Dorje, called him in a dream to return to Tibet. He traveled to his master in the dream. His guru told him that it was time for him to take up Todgal, a higher level of Dzogchen practice.  For this, he needed to go to another teacher, Jigmed Linba. 

I thought this was a very strange thing to say because I knew, of course, that Jigmed Linba was a great Dzogchen master of the eighteenth century who had been dead for many years. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood what my master had said so I asked him to explain, but he just said, “Jigmed Linba is up on the mountain behind the house. Go and see him right away.” [3] 

Disbelieving, Namkhai scaled a sheer cliff, noticing that the whole text of a tantra was incised on it, with the title of the text on a standing stone at the top, He found a cave where a beautiful boy with long flowing hair, dressed in a filmy blue garment, was seated. Could this really be the deceased Dzogchen master?  He clambered up on top of the rock and said to the boy, “I was told to come to you.” The boy motioned for him to sit, then took out a little scroll and began reading a Dzogchen text on the Four Lights of Todhgal.
     Look through the Tibetan Buddhist biographies in Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus and you will find that, again and again, gurus dream with their disciples and the masters appear in dreams to convey essential teachings.[4] This theme is well crystallized by Lama Choedak Yuthok: 

Some people actually gain enlightenment during dreams. Some practitioners while in the middle of dreams which they recognized as dreams, invited great lineage masters of past ages. They came and gave teachings, and some of these practitioners became enlightened as a result. There are a lot of whispered teachings like this. They are known as ‘near lineage’ teachings. Some practitioners who received these could write, teach and transmit the teachings with amazing eloquence. They did not have to bother about studying any texts. One master received three months’ worth of teachings in the course of a single three-hour dream.

 

References 

1. Namkhai Norbu Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen ed. John Shank (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) pp.9-10.
2. ibid pp. 51-52.
3. ibid p.102.
4. Serinity Young , Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, & Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999).
5. Lama Choedak Yuthok ed. Pauline Westwood, Lamdre: Dawn of Enlightenment. (Gorum Publications, 1997).

 

Illustration: “Riding Inside the Tiger” by Robert Moss

 

 

Midwives of a dreaming society

Out in the midst of Long Island Sound, the lighthouse is winking on its island. On a soft Sunday evening, we start our week-long training for teachers of Active Dreaming by creating our own beacon, in the form of clear statements of intention.

     We are gathered in a circle in what used to be the living room of Phil Donahue’s beach house on the Connecticut shore. Generously, he donated SeaScape to his neighbors, the Sisters of Mercy who are our hosts for the week. When I first came here, there was a mural of two larger-than-life figures on the bow of a cruise ship. The man sported a monocle with his dinner jacket, and was hoisting a martini. The woman was in flapper attire, with a highball. We christened them “Scott” and “Zelda” and toasted them as our “spirit guides”. Some earnest people, since that time, must have been offended by the party people on the wall, because the wall has been repainted flat white. Still, there is plenty of spirit in the room tonight!

     When my turn comes to speak, I announce that my intention, in opening the sixth year of my dream teacher training, is as follows: “I am here to train and empower midwives who will help to birth a dreaming society in our time, in our world.”

     I look around the circle of eager, intelligent faces and know that I will not be disappointed. We have drawn wonderfully gifted and creative dreamers and healers from British Columbia and Colorado, from Rhode Island and Texas, from Minnesota and North Carolina.

     I am seized by the depth of my responsibility to them, to help to bring their gifts into full flower and to make sure that they will have the specific tools and skills required to apply our Active Dreaming techniques to different professional and community situations, and to adapt them to suit the language and style of different environments.

     We work and play very hard over the week that unfolds. Our dream midwives regale us with marvelous stories, fresh from their dreaming – of flying through the air on a purple sofa, of batting at a panther with a black patent leather pocket book, of being entered through the spine by the luminous energy of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. We journey to the astral realm of the Moon and back. We practice techniques of emotional and imaginal healing, and learn how to help others to read the sign language of the world and use dreams for self-diagnosis. We practice speaking to many different kinds of audiences about why dreaming matters in our personal lives, and to our kind. Our dreams and our journeys with the drum burst into dance and performance and moments of pure, unalloyed joy and laughter.

     All the while, at the edge of the bushes just outside the house, three red foxes prowl. The bunny rabbits all over the property seem remarkably unfazed, by foxes or humans. Only once do we see a fox with lunch in its mouth.

     As the work deepens, I picture two faces, beyond those in our circle, that remind me of my responsibility – and that of the dream school – to a deeper world and a possible future. I see the face and form of a young woman who seems to live several centuries ahead of our current time. I became aware of her many years ago, and I know that her life and work are connected with my own. She is a priestess and a scientist. She belongs to an order of women who are both scientists and spiritual leaders. Their work is to rebuild our world after a series of disasters brought on by the ignorance and violence of men. Active Dreaming, as we practice it, is absolutely central to their work, and they have succeeded in creating a dreaming society among those who follow their guidance. In this possible future world, sharing dreams by a process like Lightning Dreamwork is the first business of the day. Dreaming is part of every level of education. Dream diagnosis and healing through imagery are mainstream practice in medicine. No important policy decision is taken without consultation with the dream seers – those with proven ability to scout possible futures and produce reliable information – whose independence is zealously guarded.

     I hope that the Earth disasters that seem to have preceded the emergence of this particular dreaming society can be avoided. I also hope that dream teachers of the quality of the priestess-scientist in my visions will rise to the position she has assumed, to help heal our lives and our world.

     Today, as dream teachers, we can provide a safe and healing space where people from every walk of life find it possible to open their hearts and reclaim the vital energy of parts of themselves lost through trauma or heartbreak or refusing to follow the heart’s deepest desires. We can help each other to find True North, our life’s flawless compass, in the thinking of the heart, so much wiser than the calculations of the head – and to gather the energy and resources required to live the path with heart, the only path worth following.

     Huge numbers of people in our times are hungry for what we are offering, although rather few are aware (as yet) of what is on offer. As dream teachers, we are called to help people to find their own answers to the eternal questions – Who am I? Where do I come from? What is my life’s purpose? – by reclaiming the knowledge of soul and spirit that belonged to them before they came into their present bodies.

     In our week at SeaScape, I see another face that reminds me that this is all about soul,

and recovering the energy of soul. The face is that of a small boy, maybe two years old. It is a round, freckly face under a yellow sun hat of the kind we used to call a Sou’wester when I was growing up in Australia. He looks very much as I did, at that age. But this is not just a younger Robert. This is Dream Boy. He has a special box – it looks like a pirate’s treasure chest – that is full of dreams. If you are lucky, he will pluck the right dream from his box and send it to you.

     In an especially powerful journey with the drum, I see Dream Boy flying through the air on great shining wings, and I am filled with elation. All is well, when the magic that’s afoot is the magic of the child who at home in the worlds of dream and imagination and knows the power of making things up.

   At the end of our week of learning and adventure, I see our new flight of dream teachers seeming to walk on water, like the egret – and then winging away in all directions, like sea birds.