The Soul throws an image before her

 

When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.

The words are from Meister Eckhart, the medieval German theologian and mystic who knew about the laws of the larger reality through direct experience. I first read then and jotted them down as an undergraduate, eons ago. They turn up now and then unexpectedly, as they did just now in an old journal. I went looking just now for the exact source (the history professor in me dies hard) and I see that you can order a Meister Eckhart Quote Bag with this inscription.

I'm tickled by the notion that instead of putting this quote in your bag of tricks, you might want to try packing what you carry through the day inside the thought.

It's a thought that demands walking meditation. Travel with it, and see how it shapes and illuminates your day. Then test it against your dreams.

The medieval master is telling us something vitally important about our relationship with time and about the secret of manifestation. He draws us to think about the confluence between what medieval theologians called the Aevum - the realm between time and eternity - and events in our world. It is in the Aevum that the incidents and circumstances of our physical lives are generated, in this understanding, through the agency of imagination, that great faculty of soul. On most days, most of us, sequestered from soul and its knowing, are merely receivers of the results of choices made in this realm that is hidden from the ordinary mind.

Who knew where we stood? 
In an aevum maybe, where time's conferred
with the beginning we gave it,
but with no end in sight.

These beckoning lines are from a poem titled "Aevum" by M.E.Caballero-Robb. They strengthen the enjoinder to walk through a day - why not today? - with Meister Eckhart's thought. That means asking, of whatever develops during the day, What image am I now entering? And, Where and how was this image created?

Then, energized by these reflections, we go the long step further, which is to seek to be present, as conscious co-creators, in the place where soul makes its choices on what we - as its vehicles - will experience in the world.

Do I sound like a mystic? Very well, you may call me a mystic, but I would say that I am a mystic of a very practical order. We are talking about how worlds are made.

By the way, a more famous Meister Eckhart quote is this: "If the only prayer you said in your life was Thank You, that would suffice." That is my own philosophy of prayer, and it is the practice of people who live close to the Earth as well as the heavens, and give thanks daily for its gifts. Oh yes, you can get that on a "quote bag" too.

Drawing by Robert Moss

You Always Have the Freedom to Change Your Attitude, and That Can Change Everything

Terrible things are happening in our world. The worst nightmares of the mind-twentieth century seem to be returning. There are days when we might find it hard to rise above despair or escape a low, lethargic mood freighted with our own negative mantras. On days like that, I often call on one of the greatest life coaches I know.

I know him from his most famous book. Maybe you do too. His book is titled Man’s Search for Meaning. His name is Viktor Frankl. He was an Existentialist — which is to say, someone who believes that we must be authors of meaning for our own lives — and a successful psychiatrist in Vienna before Nazi Germany swallowed Austria in 1938. He was a Jew and a free-thinking intellectual, two reasons for the Nazis to send him to a concentration camp. For several years he was in Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps.

In the camp, every vestige of humanity was taken from him, except what he could sustain in his mind and his heart. He was in constant pain, reduced to a near-skeleton with a tattooed number on his arm, liable to be beaten or killed at any moment on the whim of a guard. He was there to be worked to death. He watched those around him shot or beaten or carted off to the gas chambers every day.

He made an astonishing choice. He decided that, utterly deprived of freedom in the nightmare world around him, he would tend one precious candle of light within. He would exercise the freedom to choose his attitude. It sounds preposterous, if you don’t know the story of what unfolded. When people tell us we have a bad attitude in ordinary circumstances, we are usually not grateful. The suggestion that we can choose our attitude when the world around us seems cold and bleak, or we have suffered a major setback, even heartbreak, sounds cruel, and maybe preposterous. But let’s stay with Viktor Frankl.

When the light went out in his world, he managed to light that inner candle of vision. Despite the pain in his body and the screams and groans around him, he made an inner movie, a film of a possible life in a world where the Nazis had been defeated and Hitler was a memory. It was an impossible vision of course, an escapist fantasy. There was no way he was going to survive Auschwitz.

But he kept working on his inner movie, night after night, as director, scriptwriter and star. He produced a scene in which he was giving a lecture in a well-filled auditorium in New York City. His body had filled out, and he was wearing a very fine custom suit. The people in the audience were intelligent and enthusiastic. The theme of his lecture was “The Psychology of the Concentration Camps.” In his movie, not only were the death camps a thing of the past. He had retained the sanity and academic objectivity to speak about what went on during the Holocaust from a professional psychiatric perspective.

This exercise in inner vision, conducted under almost unimaginably difficult circumstances, got Viktor Frankl through. Not only did he survive the death camp; in 1946, one year after the war, he gave that lecture in his nice new suit in the New York auditorium from his inner movie set.

What do we take away from this?

First, that however tough our situation may seem to be, we always have the freedom to choose our attitude, and this can change everything. Let’s allow William James to chime in: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

Second, that our problems, however bad, are unlikely to be quite as bad as the situation of someone who has been sent to a Nazi death camp. That thought may help us to gain perspective, and to stand back from a welter of grief and self-pity and rise to a place where we can start to dream up something better.

Third, we can make inner movies, and if they are good enough it is possible that they will play in the theater of the world.

If we take Viktor Frankl’s example to heart, we see that choosing your attitude can be an exercise in creative imagination that is much more practical and original than trying to edit your inner soundtrack (though that is worth trying) or telling yourself that you can’t afford the energy of a negative thought (you can learn to use the energy of any strong emotion, including grief and rage).

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through the Twelve Secrets of Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Meeting Your Dreams in Everyday life

Do you meet your dreams on the roads of everyday life?

There are dreams you would love to meet in ordinary life because they are full of joy and romance and creative fulfillment. You want the magic to spill over into the physical world, That may require some effort on your part, to bring a map from the dream and follow clues from that map to get you to the place of happy manifestation.

There are dreams you don't want to meet in everyday life because they are full of challenge or scary stuff or mere tedium. You need to confront what you don't like in the dream in the place where you encountered it and see whether you can change things inside the dream. If not, you need to bring enough information from the dream to clarify what it may portend - and the take the necessary action to avoid meeting that bad dream on your ordinary roads.

There are dreams about which your feelings are neutral. You're not sure whether you want to meet them in physical life or leave them as memories of experiences in another reality. near or far from where you are, waking. You don't need to hurry to do anything with these dreams. You just file the information in your memory bank - and your journal - and make yourself ready to encounter a corresponding event if the dream shows up on your life road.

Photo: "Rainbow Serpent on the Sidewalk" by Robert Moss

There is one direction in which space is open to us

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 reminded of some 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.

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

Photos of Lake Champlain by RM

In the beginning was the dream

The Aborigines of the northern Kimberley ranges say that in the beginning, there was only earth and sky. In the earth was the Great Mother Ungud, in the form of a great snake. In the sky was Wallanganda, the All-Father, in the form of the Milky Way. The sky god threw water on the earth; the earth goddess made it deep. In the night, as they dreamed, life arose from the watered earth in the shapes of their dreams.
     From the sky god’s dreaming a spiritual force went forth as images that he projected on the faces of rocks and the walls of caves. These images can still be seen, painted in reds, whites, and blacks. Some say a mystical bird was the original painter, grasping the shapes of the sky-god’s dreams in his own dreaming. After the paintings were done, the sky god reproduced their forms in the bodies of living beings, which he sent out across the land.
    The paintings are the spiritual source of living beings. In the Kimberley rock paintings, Wondjina figures do not have mouths or eyes because these are the gift of Ungud. The Wondjina spirit — associated with rainmaking and fresh water — lives beneath the paintings in the waters under the earth, creating “child-germs,” spirit children. In a dream, a father-to-be will find one of these spirit children. In another dream, he will put it into his wife. It assumes human form in her body. At death, this part of the soul returns to the water hole from which it came
   Though the names may seem alien or exotic, this is a story about you and me. It reminds us that the process of manifestation begins with a movement or intention on the spiritual planes that is projected toward physical reality through images — the facts and events of the imaginal realm. By entering the imaginal world through dream travel, we can become active participants in this process and cocreators of the circumstances of our lives on Earth. As we learn to work with the hidden order of events, we come to recognize that is also reveals itself through the play of synchronicity in everyday life. As evolving beings, we come to take dreams more literally and waking life more symbolically.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Making Songlines" by Robert Moss

Invitation to the Voyage of Imagination

The secret of manifesting a desirable future through the power of imagination is to take yourself to a scene in which you are enjoying the fulfillment of a deep desire.
 
You will name that desire and you will check that your body believes you and your heart is with you. You will project yourself into a place in the possible future where you have manifested your heart's desire.   

This is more than a visualization. You must taste it, touch it, feel it, inhabit it richly with all your inner senses. You must bring back sensory impressions you can hold in your body.   

Then every day you arouse those impressions in your body and let them become fully physical. With this your vision of the outcome you desire will grow stronger and closer.   

Do you need a prompt to get you started? Frame your intention: to find your dream home, or publish your book, or achieve healing and recovery, or union with your perfect partner. Make sure you reach into your heart and your gut in framing your intention. Let it be more than an agenda coming from your head.    

Now picture this: you are looking at a golden path leading into deep, rich woods. You are going to follow this path as far as you need to go to reach the place or the encounter that will embody your fulfillment of your desire. 

You will be in this situation with all your inner senses. I do mean be there. Taste it, touch it, smell it, open your hearing as well as your vision.

You will bring back a vivid, tactile impression you can hold in your body as well as your mind.     

Here's a simple example of how this recently worked for me. On the eve of a total knee replacement, I set the intention of achieving fast and full recovery. I had been told that while the surgery today is usually straightforward and successful, the rehab phase can be long and painful and frustrating.    

With the aid of a little shamanic drumming - less than five minutes - I set off on that golden path into the woods. I breathed in the freshness of evergreens, laced with wild berries and the sweet decay of nurse logs. I heard birdsong and the stir of animals in the undergrowth.    

I found myself moving at increasing speed, excited by the wild beauty of the woods around me, eager to see what might be waiting for me round the next bend of that golden path. 

And there he was, three times my height. I was shocked to find him on my path, though I have long counted him an ally in healing and all my shamanic work. The bear was the color of golden honey. 

He swept me up into his embrace and we danced together. His fur was soft and smelled like fine cashmere. He span me loose and inspired me to dance solo, in a free-spirited Irish jig. My body felt strong and supple.  
 
I came back from this journey certain that I had been given the perfect vision for manifesting fast and full recovery. I immediately celebrated the bear by eating salmon and berries. I purchased a fine honey-colored cashmere scarf to hold the wonderful smell and feel of the golden bear's fur in my senses.    

After knee replacement, I found my body healing very well with the help of the golden bear. I was discharged from hospital the morning after surgery after a physical therapist checked me out and declared that my body had remarkable flexibility, already able to accomplish exercises that might take others months to master. 

Two weeks after surgery, I took myself off opioid painkillers and was given a rating of 121 percent for mobility by an outpatient physical therapist. I started walking my little dog and managed an 8-block ramble round the neighborhood less than three weeks after surgery.  
  
I'm pretty sure the day will come when I will do that Irish jig.   
 
Are you inspired to embark on a journey towards manifesting what you deeply desire? Your ideal departure point for this voyage of imagination is the twilight space between sleep and awake when your body is dormant. 

You can set off the shaman's way, with the help of drumming. I have made a recording of my own shamanic drumming that is ideal for this as well as lucid dream adventures.

Bon voyage!

Art: "The Invitation" by Lalenya Laurie Vann

Marry your field

"The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born." This beautiful, passionate statement was made by W.H. Auden and it takes us right inside the crucible in which all creative action is born. It's sexy, it's spiritual, it makes your heart beat faster, it puts a champagne fizz of excitement into the air. It suffuses everything around with incredible light, so you feel you are seeing the curve of a flower stem or the bubbles in a glass for the very first time.

     Such depth, such passion, such focused rapture is not only the province of poets, though we may need poetic speech to suggest what and how it is. Are you with me now? I am talking about you, and me, and the creative leap we can and will make as the year turns. The essence of the creative act is to bring something new into the world. You may have no earthly idea, at this moment, about how exactly you can do that.

     So let me offer some eminently practical guidance, based on what Auden said about the roots of creation. Start by marrying your field.

    What is your field? It's not work in the ordinary sense, or what your diplomas say you are certified to do, or how you describe yourself in a job resume - although it can encompass all of those things. Your field is where you ache to be. Your field is what you will do, day or night, for the sheer joy of the doing, without counting the cost or the consequences. Your field is the territory within which you can do The Work that your deeper life is calling you to do. Your field is not limitless. You can't bring anything into creative manifestation without accepting a certain form or channel, which requires you to set limits and boundaries. So your field is also the place within which the creative force that is in you will develop a form.

     If you are going to bring something new into your world, find the field you will marry, as the poet marries language, as the artist marries color and texture, as the chef marries taste and aroma, as the swimmer marries the water.

     Let's say that you have a notion that your creative act may involve writing. Maybe you even think you have a book, or a story or screenplay in you. For you, marrying the field will require you to marry words, and be their constant lover. You'll engage in orgies of reading, have tantric sex with a first (or third) draft. You'll kiss your lover in the morning by writing before you go out into the world, and when you go out you'll gather bouquets for your sweetheart by collecting fresh material from the call of a bird, the rattle of a streetcar, the odd accent of that guy on the cellphone, that unexpected phrase in the ad in the subway car.

     You'll work at all this, because marriages aren't always sweet. Some days you may hardly be on speaking terms. Some days you feel your partner hates you or is cheating on you with someone else, maybe the fellow who just got a piece in the New Yorker or is merely in front of the mike in the neighborhood poetry slam. But you carry on. You fetch the groceries. You tuck your partner up in bed at night, and promise to dream together.

     And out of this constancy - through tantrums and all - will come that blaze of creation when the sun shines at midnight, when time will stop or speed for you as you will, when you are so deep in the Zone that no move can be wrong. Depending on your choice of theme and direction, you may find you are joined by other creative intelligences, reaching to you from across time and dimensions in that blessed union that another poet, Yeats, defined as the "mingling of minds".

     When the sun no longer shines at midnight, when you are back on clock time, you won't waste yourself regretting that today you're not in the Zone. You are still married. You'll do the work that now belongs to The Work. 

Art: "Voyage" by Eve Fouquet. 

Your soul throws an image ahead of you

When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.

The words are  from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. He knew about the laws of the larger reality through direct experience. The master is telling us something vitally important about our relationship with time and about the secret of manifestation.

He draws us to think about the confluence between what medieval theologians called the Aevum – the realm between time and eternity – and events in our world. It is in the Aevum that the incidents and circumstances of our physical lives are generated, through the agency of imagination, that great faculty of soul. On most days, most of us, sequestered from soul and its knowing, are merely receivers of the results of choices made in this realm that is hidden from the ordinary mind.

Who knew where we stood?
In an aevum maybe, where time’s conferred
with the beginning we gave it,
but with no end in sight.

These beckoning lines are from a poem titled “Aevum” by M.E.Caballero-Robb. They strengthen the enjoinder to walk through a day – why not today? – with Meister Eckhart’s thought. That means asking, of whatever develops during the day, What image am I now entering? And, Where and how was this image created?

Energized by these reflections, we can go a long step further; we can seek to be present, as conscious co-creators, in the place where soul makes its choices on what we – as its vehicles – will experience in the world.

If this sounds like mysticism, it is mysticism of a very practical order. We are talking about how worlds are made, and re-made.

Image: Meister Eckhart portal, Erfurt church

Hold the vision in your mind so you do not become lost

Long before Columbus, the Polynesians discovered and settled virtually every island group in the Pacific, creating a single sphere of cultural life that covered nearly 10 million square miles of the earth's surface. Polynesian sailors crossed the sea in open catamarans, made with tools of stone, bone and coral, their sails woven from pandanus. They sailed without maps, compasses or instruments.    

According to Polynesian tradition, the first human to see Easter Island was a dream traveler and the island was settled because a young king trusted the traveler’s story and acted upon it.     In a time of savage warfare among the Polynesian islanders, a priest named Hau Maka, who was also the royal tattooist, went scouting for a new home for his people. He flew across the ocean in a dream and saw Rapa Nui (Easter Island). On returning from his dream journey, he described the island and its location in great detail to his young chief, Hotu Matu’a.    

The king trusted Hau Maka’s dream. He gathered all of his people and ordered them to prepare for a long sea journey to a new land. The people set sail with everything they had. After two months, they reached Anakena Bay on Easter Island, and found it just as the king’s tattooist had described.     

Polynesians crossed more than 2,000 miles of the Pacific to find and settle Hawaii in the same way.     

Captain Cook saw the skills of the wayfinder when he took the Polynesian navigator Tupaia with him on a voyage of more than 13,000 km from Tahiti to New Zealand. Cook noted that at all times the wayfinder knew the exact direction of Tahiti.    It was hard for the outside world to understand or credit their extraordinary prowess as navigators until the Polynesian Voyaging Society launched a double-hulled catamaran, dubbed the Hokule'a (the Hawaiian name for Arcturus, the sacred star of Hawaii) in 1975, and Hawaiians crossed the seas the old-fashioned way.     

Nainoa Thompson and the organizers brought a master navigator, a wayfinder or waymaker, from Micronesia to train the crew. His name was Mau Piailug. He was born on a coral islet smaller than one square mile, in the Caroline islands. His father and his grandfather were wayfinders. They began his training by keeping him in a tidal pool for hours when he was an infant. When he became seasick on his first sea voyage, aged eight, they tide him to the back of the canoe by a rope and dragged him through open waters until the nausea passed. When he was fourteen, he tied his own testicles to the rigging of a canoe to become fully sensitive to the movements.    He learned to read the coming of a storm in a halo round the moon and in the movement of dolphins heading for sheltered waters.    

In preparing the crew of the Hokule'a for the voyage to Tahiti, he trained them to read wind and water, stars and birds, as he did. The master class took them deeper. On a point of land on Oahu, he had them spin until their senses were blurred and then tasked them to turn, eyes closed, in the direction of the island that was their destination.     When satisfied they were pointing the right way, he told them: "Go there. Be there with all of your senses." He wanted them to grow the destination so strong, in their minds and their inner senses, that they would bring the island towards them, Finally, he instructed them, "Hold the vision in your mind so you do not become lost."

Image: Hokule'a

Sighthounds and mermaids: the magic of converging dreams

1

We all want to spend more time in that liminal space between sleep and awake. In the hours before dawn the gateway to a magical blue world opened to me in that space, and then the blue dream manifested in the physical world in the form of a painting gifted to me of which I had no prior knowledge. Before dawn, I set the intention, "Show me what I need to see." In that in-between state I immediately received a clear vision of the outline of an ancient Egyptian sighthound on stone. I was not sure whether I was looking at a carved relief or at a very faint shadow. Either way,although the lines were faint, I had impression that this ancient dog, bred for sight and speed, was in movement, was about to spring from the rock and race into another scene.
    Dreams require action, and set us research assignments. I found a photo of ancient Egyptian relief that looks very like my hypnopompic sighting. I see that this breed, the ancestor of the greyhound, is often called Saluki; the etymology of that word - Sumerian or Arabic - is disputed.Egyptian themes came up strongly in the first session of my workshop in Prague the day before. On icy sidewalks, I have been relying heavily on my black dog stick; the fine features of the face have more of the sighthound than the lab.
    I took a tram to the Staroměstská stop and walked to Old Town Square en route to the tall house on a winding cobbled alley behind the square that is the home of Maitrea, which hosts my workshops in Prague. As I walked, I felt the quivering vibration of that image of the sighthound, set none too securely on stone. I felt wind rushing past its long head and its lead body as it raced after a target, dissolving space. I was curious to see how this dog would run.

2

The follow-up was swift and fascinating. On the second day of my workshop in Prague, I asked people to come together in groups of three and four and share dreams by our Lightning Dreamwork process, in which we take turns to play storyteller and guide.
    In my dream-sharing group, the first report, from a young Czech woman, was a thriller.
    She felt a strong wind and started running with it, reveling in her speed. As she ran faster and faster, like the wind, she realized that her body had changed. She was now in the body of a very lean canine, something like a greyhound, except even taster, taller, thinner. She was seized by a happy sense of wild freedom. She wondered if she was becoming a wolf. Yet her bodily form, in the dream, still felt very light.
    She came to new landscapes, to cities and beaches, to places with many humans. Now her form became human again. But she kept the eyes, the eyes of the wind-runner. When I asked some questions, she clarified that her dog was indeed one that tracks through sight.
    I shared my own report from the place between sleep and awake. We were all delighted by the convergence. We agreed that the message, for both of us, might be to remember to use the speed and sight of an ancient and primal ally. The Czech dreamer felt that, as she rehearse for any shift in life, or simply wants to see things at a distance in space and time, she can use those eyes and fleet feet to where she needs to go, beyond the perception of the ordinary body.

3

In our little group of four, another dreamer shared a night adventure that flowed from the intention, "Show me what I need to know." In the high moment of the dream, she met a "calm mermaid". We were struck with the freshness of the phrase. We had never heard a mermaid described as "calm".
    The calm mermaid had counsel for the dreamer: Relax. Breathe. Give Up Your Will to Stop. When we talked over the last bit, the dreamer told us she had a tendency to give up before finishing things in life. She agreed that the calm mermaid might be a deeper self, rising to give her exactly the advice she needed in response to her intention for the night.
    In the way of synchronicity, the fourth member of our group, who played guide for the mermaid dreamer, had had a big experience of her own with a mermaid in a journey with the drum in our session the previous evening. She found a wild fish-woman in a place of pain and anger, and recognized a part of herself that had separated because of a life trauma, and had not yet moved out of rage and grief. She found a way, in her journey, not only to recognize but reclaim that energy.
     Though the wild fish-woman was very different from the "calm" mermaid, we recognized a common theme: the discovery, in a sleep dream and a hyper-awake shaman dream, of a previously unrecognized aspect  of the self, now rising from another element - from the depths - with the potential to bring wholeness or wisdom.

4

Grow a family, where people tend deeply to each other's dreams of the night and dreams of life, learn to share by a process that is mutually empowering, and you will notice the magic of converging dreams. In my workshops, we often find ourselves dreaming together, in interactive group shamanic journeys. These journeys are often opened by  the sharing of an individual dream that can become a portal for everyone, as we take off, powered by the energy of the drum.
    The convergence may come in entirely spontaneous ways, unexpected until we awaken to how people with shared interests and soul connections may be joined in adventures beyond the physical plane. Sometimes we feel blessed by an oneiric logic of manifestation, as with my experience of the blue dream the previous morning, which I saw take form on the physical plane.
     The last dream shared in our smaller group in Prague yesterday was a dream of cut flowers, of trying to get the arrangement right and clip the stalks to exactly the right length. It was shared by the woman who met the wilder fish-lady. As we discussed the dream, she said that she felt it had some connection with a grandmother who might be approaching death.
    The symbolism of cut flowers became very deep. It was reinforced, for me, by a phrase I had read on the first page of a fantasy novel * I had opened for the first time on a plane on my way to Prague: "the sound of cut flowers". You might not be surprised to read, "the silence of cut flowers". "The sound of cut flowers"brought for me, the sense of the great pressure of a force building up behind the scenes, something that was getting ready to manifest.
   The dreamer of the cut flowers said she would carry that phrase with her, to orient her as she now sought to play soul friend for her grandmother.


* The novel is The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss