"What is your contract with God?"

Who could be knocking on the door, so late? Reluctantly, I left my book and the warmth of the fire. White moonlight gave the smooth oval of my visitor's face a pearly glow. A pleasant face, without distinctive features. The man at the door appeared to be ten years younger than myself, and perhaps a bit simple. I sensed a quiet fervor in him. Was he a Jesus freak, one of the kind who peddle religion at the doorstep?
     "I come from my father's house." His first words commanded my whole attention. I knew that this statement was true, and better than any identity card.
     He gave me a name I recognized from my father's Scottish family.
     He watched me with steady eyes, unblinking. He asked calmly, "What is your contract with God?"
     The scene shimmered, then exploded. Back in my body, I rose from the dream gasping, as if coming up from under a giant wave on a surf beach. The bedside clock told me it was shortly after 3 a.m. That's a popular time for people to be born, or to die. My wife was breathing evenly, away in a different dreamland, and did not stir as I slipped from the bed and padded downstairs to record what had just happened to me.
     I had no doubt that I had received a visitation. The stranger at my door had come to me with a question that pierced me to the marrow. The question implied that at some time, in some reality, I had made a sacred contract, "a contract with God". If this were so, then how could I have forgotten it? What would be the penalty for violating such a contract, in God knows how many ways? Would amnesia serve as an alibi?
     This visitation sowed a sort of divine discontent in me. It made me restless in familiar modes of living,    urgent to know the contents of the contract my visitor had mentioned. It brought back shards of memory, from my earlier life and from other lives. I remembered another visitor, who appeared as a radiant young man on white nights in my boyhood, and engaged in extended conversation; he taught me that the knowledge that matters is acquired through anamnesis, through "remembering" what we knew, on the level of soul or spirit, before we entered our present bodies.
     We humans are forgetful animals. We forget and remember, remember and forget. Sometimes it is necessary to die in order to remember what really matters. There is a magnificent story about that in Plato's Republic. It concerns a man who died and came back, a soldier named Er. In today's language, we might call him a near-death experiencer. From his experiences on the other side, Er brought back one of the greatest accounts in world literature of how each of us, in a space between lives, may choose the terms and conditions of our next life experience before our souls take up residence in a new body. There are varying degrees of choice, in this version. Then there is the question of how much an incoming soul will be allowed to remember after taking up residence in a body on earth. On the way to the body, a soul gets to drink from Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness; according to how deeply it drinks, it will remember a little, or a lot, or perhaps nothing at all.
     I like, even more, a Yoruba version of how we choose our births and may be helped to remember the sacred contracts we tend to forget. As the Yoruba tell it, before it enters a body the ori, or individual soul, kneels before the high God, Olodumare, to confirm a destiny that is intended to unfold in a new life.  Fortunate, evolved souls are able to choose their destinies. However, many souls have only a limited degree of choice, and many more have their destinies "laid upon their backs."

     When a soul has received its life contract from the high God, it embarks on its journey toward physical birth. At one of the gates between the worlds, it must answer the question of the Gatekeeper, the oni’bode. 

Gatekeeper: Where are you going?
Soul: I am going into the world.
Gatekeeper: What are you going to do there?

Can a contract with God be renegotiated? I am cheered by the Yoruba teaching that “an unhappy destiny can be rectified if it can be ascertained what it is.”

    I am also inspired by another Yoruba insight: that we have an ally on a higher plane of reality who is in no way alien to ourselves. This ally can help us remember our contract with God, and coach us on how to fulfill it or modify it. While the soul is down here in "the marketplace of this world", it has a “double in heaven,” observing from a higher level. From one life to another, they may swap places, alternately playing the role of actor and witness or memory-keeper. 
    Maybe the man at my door who said he came from "my father's house" was such a being. Certainly, he has inspired me to recover elements of what I regard as a sacred contract, and to live, work and play, with a clear sense of life purposes to which I believe a committed myself before I came into my present life.
    Let me hasten to add that remembering a sacred contract doesn't mean getting stuck in details. A babalawo, or high divination priest of Ifa, the Yoruba oracle, once told me that contrary to what most people suppose, most things in life are negotiable. I may be interested in renegotiating one clause on my contract that says I am supposed to publish 68 books; I am only up to 26. In the workshops where I guide intrepid dream travelers to make journeys to recover their sacred contracts, I sometimes suggest a follow-up visit to an otherworldly yet cheerily familiar Contracts Office where negotiation is the name of the game. 

For more on the Myth of Er and Yoruba teachings about how the ori receives a destiny, please see my book Dreamgates.

Photos: "Dream Detective" and "Yoruba Gelede Mask" by RM

The Gates of Anamnesis

Essential knowledge comes to us through soul remembering: through reclaiming the knowledge that belonged to us, on the level of mind or spirit, before we came into the body in our present life experience. This has been central to my understanding of everything since I was in my early teens, when I received instruction from an interesting mentor.

    He was one of my invisible companions. He usually appeared at my bedside in the middle of the night, when I was drifting in a twilight state of consciousness in that place between sleep and awake. He presented himself as a radiant young man from the eastern end of the Mediterranean. He came from a Greek community on the coast of the country we now call Syria.
     His name was Philemon. Many years later, I discovered another Philemon, but this was the first time I had heard this name. This beautiful young man spoke to me in the language of the Platonists. He told me, “Everything important, everything you need to know that matters comes to you by way of anamnesis.”  The brain of my fourteen-year-old self did not previously contain that difficult word anamnesis. You can actually find anamnesis in an English language dictionary. However, it is not exactly household word. It's Greek and Philemon was using it in a very special sense.
     Anamnesis literally means “remembering”, but it's about more than remembering what you put on the grocery list or what you read in that textbook. Anamnesis in the doctrine of the Neoplatonist philosophers anamnesis is about remembering what belongs to us on the level of soul and spirit. Remembering perhaps the reasons we came here in the first place, why we took on embodiment in this life. It is as important as that. To regain such essential knowledge requires the practice of soul remembering.

    I learned later that in another Greek school of philosophy, attributed to Pythagoras, anamnesis is also about remembering your connection with a series of personalities living in other times. These may be reincarnational experiences, but there may be even more going on. Through anamnesis, you come to recognize that you are connected with personalities in other times and other dimensions and you can communicate with each other. When you do that, you bring together the knowledge of many selves. You start to see how your present life story is part of a much larger pattern. You find it possible to draw together lessons and gifts from many members of your multidimensional family.
     Heady stuff for a teenage boy in Canberra, Australia. I could do a little research, and was already reading Plutarch, but I was only able to unfold what all of this was about when I got to university and had access to a real research library. We did not have Google back in those days.
     When I read Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections at seventeen or eighteen, I discovered that Jung had a guide he called Philemon.  Jung’s Philemon looked very different from mine. His portrait is in the Red Book. Jung saw him as an old man with a long beard, bull horns and wings of kingfisher blue.He said that his Philemon taught him "the objective reality of the psyche"; that what we see as subjective or interior phenomenon are also out there. The contents of the psyche are also objective. They are both personal and transpersonal.

Over all the years, anamnesis has remained one of the most important words in my personal vocabulary, and soul remembering is central to my teaching and practice. We came here for a reason. We may or may not love the reason when we remember it, but we are here for a reason and we come here with stories from before this life. We want to remember those stories. We come here with soul kin, with a soul family extended over space and time. We want to remember more about that and start to connect consciously with our soul family. They will know us.  They will know us. They reach to us as we reach for them. As the Irish mystic AE affirmed, Your own will come to you.

Painting by AE (George Russell)

The forgetful envoy

You are sent from your homeland on an important mission, to rescue something beyond price. You understand the enormous risks of this assignment, and you freely choose to fulfill it. On leaving your homeland, you are honored and mourned, because you are dying, for a time, to those who love you and know you best.
             The conditions of your assignment require you to put on the clothes and the habits of the country where you will operate. You must fit in with those around you and follow their ways. This is hard for you, to begin with, because the people here live as if there is nothing beyond their world of getting and spending. Their pleasures are tawdry and their drugs numb the mind, but you are required to pass for one of them, so you do as they do.
             In the miasmic conditions of this plane, you start to forget why you came here. Your memory of your homeland, of its achingly beautiful music and its true communion of souls, seems like a fantastic dream that is starting to fade away. You let those around you, in your new country, tell you what life is about and you act in accordance with their valuation of things.
             You join them in snickering at dreamers who rant of other worlds.
             Then one night there is a knock at your door. You open it, and feel a strange wind, like the beating of giant wings. The person framed in the doorway is strangely familiar. When he speaks, his words leap to your heart. I come from my Father’s house. He is here to remind you of the mission you forgot. You are weeping now, ashamed. He is not interested in your tears. Now you remember your contract, you are required to fulfill it.

This is my own version of a story I feel I am living. You’ll find versions in sources ranging from the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl to Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta. Perhaps it will speak to you too. I find it useful to believe (as Plato believed) that each of us agreed to a contract before we came into this world in our present bodies. The trick is to remember the terms of that sacred contract, and then to find the courage and constancy to fulfill them. I am grateful for the night, long ago, when I heard a knock on my door in the middle of the night and opened it to find a young man outside, his face shining like the moon. He said, I come from my father’s house. And the dream was more real than the life I had been living, in this sublunary world.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Libraty.