The Forgetful Envoy

Life is a process of remembering and forgetting, forgetting and remembering.

    The theme of the forgotten mission is beautifully conveyed by the “Hymn of the Soul” in the gnostic Acts of Thomas. The hero is sent from the East into Egypt in search of the Pearl beyond price, which may be his own Higher Self. Drugged by the food and drink of the country where he now finds himself, he forgets who he is. From the distant land from which he has come, the king and queen and “all the princes of Parthia” send a message to awaken him to the memory of who and what he is and recall him to his forgotten mission.

    The same theme resonates, in modern dress, in Doris Lessing’s allegorical novel Shikasta. An envoy is sent to Earth from a higher civilization in a distant galaxy. To reach his destination, he must pass through a vast waiting area, a plane of mists and illusions, where souls wander between incarnations. On Earth, the envoy succumbs to the miasmal conditions; he forgets who he is and why he has come. An new envoy must be sent to remind him.
    Does the story sound familiar? It could be yours. It has certainly been mine.
    One of my favorite literary versions is Herman Hesse's novella The Journey to the East.  In a time of social collapse, when "there was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality", the narrator joins a pilgrimage to the East under the guidance of a mysterious order described only as the League. He journeys far in search of his spiritual home and regains the knowledge of essential things, such as his purpose for living. However, when he returns to his former environment, he loses his journals and souvenirs and begins to doubt whether his experiences were real. People around him don't believe his accounts. Soon he succumbs to their skepticism. He wonders whether the League itself is only a figment of his imagination.
    But the League has not forgotten him. He is one of its own. He is invited to read his personal file in the League archives. He discovers that four centuries earlier, in another lifetime, he also belonged to the League. He is ashamed. How could he possibly have forgotten this? In a secret alcove, he is permitted to draw back a veil and makes his most extraordinary discovery. It is a small statue that proves to be two figures in one, joined back to back. One of the figures is the traveler himself. In the other, he recognizes the features of the guide who led him on his journey to the East.
    As he studies the twinned figures, amazed, the statue comes to life. His own image melts and flows into that of the guide. It seems that, when fusion is complete, his ordinary self will be absorbed into the larger identity of the guide, the form of a Higher Self.

    Like Hesse's League, our true spiritual teachers do not forget. When we open ourselves to the possibility of remembering who we are and what we might become, they communicate clearly. To receive their knowledge — and recover the knowledge that belonged to us before we came through the tunnel of the birth canal — we must be in a corresponding state of consciousness. As Anaïs Nin remarked, “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

    Ordinary consciousness is a candle bobbing on a dark river, casting an inconstant circle of light across the water, in which an occasional creature from the deep can be glimpsed indistinctly. The river is vast, flowing into a boundless ocean. This is the sea of the greater Self. We cannot see it by the light of our daily trivial mind, which scarcely combs back the darkness.
    When I was a lonely adolescent in Australia, an inner guide who appeared to me in the form of a radiant young man from the eastern end of the Mediterranean reminded me that the knowledge that matters comes to us through anamnesis. The word literally means "remembering", the antithesis of amnesia. For Plato and the neo-Platonists, it means remembering the knowledge of mind and spirit that belongs to us on a higher plane, knowledge to which we had access before we came into our present bodies.
    Humans are forgetful animals. We forget and remember, remember and forget. Yet our true spiritual teachers stalk us in dreams and speak to us in liminal states of consciousness when we turn off our routine soundtrack and can hear a deeper voice.


Image: Library of the Clementinum, Prague

The archangel of dreams

Gabriel is the archangel of dreams, for all three peoples of the Book – Jews, Christians and Muslims.

He first appears in scripture in the Book of Daniel, where he explains a troubling vision that Daniel does not understand. The archangel shows himself in the form of a man. But when he comes closer, Daniel is seized with fear and awe and falls prostrate on the ground. [Daniel 8:13-16] When Gabriel comes again to explain a prophecy about the restoration of Jerusalem, he “swoops” on Daniel in “full flight.” [Dan. 9:22]

The name Gabriel is a composite of two Hebrew words, meaning “man” (gever) and “God” (El). As Rabbi Joel Covitz comments, “Gabriel brings man to God and God to man, thus divinizing man and humanizing God.” [1]

In the Talmud, Gabriel figures as an angel of justice, smiting the hosts of Sennacherib with a sharpened scythe. He is also an interpreter between nations, fluent in languages such as Syriac and Chaldee. In Jewish tradition, Gabriel is sometimes identified with the nameless voice that told Noah to prepare the Ark, and the invisible force that prevented Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, and the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush.

The Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, identifies Gabriel both as the Master of Dreams, and as the angel who mentors the soul before birth. In this conception, the bringer of dreams is also the source of the soul’s knowledge of its destiny and its place in the order of creation.

In the Christian story, Gabriel is the angel of the Annunciation. He appears to Mary to announce the coming of the Christ, as he formerly appeared to Zacharias to announce the coming of John the Baptist. He visits Joseph in a dream to reveal the identity of the divine child. He returns in another dream to warn the family to flee from Herod’s persecution.

The beauty of his face and form are almost feminine in countless Renaissance images of the Annunciation – in Leonardo’s version, for example, and in Melozzo da Forli’s.

The whole of Islam hangs on Gabriel’s relationship, as dream guide, with the prophet Muhammad. The prophet claimed it was Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic) of the “140 pairs of wings”, who dictated the Koran to him, sura by sura. It was Gabriel who escorted Muammad on his Night Journey (miraaj) to gain the personal knowledge of higher worlds.

Gabriel brought Muhammad an extraordinary ride, the Buraq, sometimes depicted as a mule with a woman’s face. Like the human mind, the Buraq is restive and must be calmed by the angel before it can carry Muhammad through the many worlds. They fly to Jerusalem, swift as thought. They ascend to higher realms from the Dome of the Rock. They explore successive heavens – some say seven, others nine – where Muhammad interviews spiritual masters who once lived on earth, as well as planetary angels.

Gabriel parts company with Muhammad at the Lote Tree of the Farthest Boundary. The Lote Tree is unlike any tree known on earth. It marks the outer limit of the realm of images; beyond this, the intellect may not go.

When Muhammad returns to his body, with the inspiration for the Koran, he finds that water from the jug his mystical steed kicked over during its take-off is still spilling onto the floor of his cave. His travels through all the heaven worlds have taken less time than is required to empty a jug of water.
    A hadith says that Gabriel used to come to the Prophet in the form of Dihya Kalbi, the most beautiful of his contemporaries. [2]

Muslims believe that Gabriel descends to earth once a year on the Night of Destiny, towards the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

In Kabbalah, Gabriel is associated with Yesod, Foundation, and the sphere of the Moon. In the Western Mystery traditions, his  color is blue and his element is water. Coptic Christians associate him with Anubis, the canine-headed Egyptian patron of dreaming and astral travel. In Celtic blessings Gabriel is sometimes called the Seer of the Virgin.

My favorite account of Gabriel is from Rumi. The great Persian mystical poet put himself inside the scene in which Mary first encountered the archangel and found that (of course) she was terrified.

Alone in her room, Mary saw a “heart-ravishing form”. It “rose up before her from the face of the earth, bright as the moon and the sun.”

She trembled with fear. She was naked and feared that her body would be ravished by this amazing power.

She was so scared she jumped out of her skin, trusting herself to the protection of God. She was practiced in “flight to the unseen.” “Seeing this world to be a kingdom without permanence, she made a fortress of the presence of God” – and sought shelter in that fortress now.

The angel spoke to her. “I am the true messenger of the Presence. Do not fear me.” As he spoke, a pure light flamed from his lips, like a candle, and spiraled up to the star Arcturus.

“You flee from me from the seen into the unseen, where I am lord and king. What are you thinking? My home is in the unseen. What you see before you is only a portrait. Mary, look closely, for I am difficult to grasp. I am a new moon and a yearning in the heart.

“You seek refuge from the one who is your refuge. You confuse the Friend of your soul with a stranger. You flee from the Friend you seek. Don’t choose sorrow when what is before you is joy.”[3] 

Thirty years ago, in bright sunlight, I had a vision of the archangel as a being of feminine beauty formed of solidified light. I fell on my knees,streaming tears, on a dirt road behind the farm house where I was then living. I wrote a poem for Gabriel from that vision.

Song for Gabriel

My heart is a song that rises

It is a rainbow bridge

spanning abysses 

of place and time

My heart is a song that rises

to walk in the One Light

to heal the wound

between earth and sky

    My heart is a song that rises

It is the crystal fire

that wakens the sleeper 

into the dream

My heart is a song that rises 

It is the pure waterfall 

that cleanses my path

with tears of joy

References

1. Joel Covitz, Visions of the Night: A Study of Jewish Dream Interpretation (Boston: Shambhala,1996) 58
2. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) 117, 396n4

3. Freely adapted from A.J.Arberry's rendition in Tales from the Masnavi (London: Curzon Press, 1994) 267-268.

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Gabriel as Annunciating Angel by Melozzo da Forli (1438-1494)

Know the myth you are living

As some people use the word, myth is synonymous with fake news, or superstition, or outmoded hand-me down beliefs. A myth may be a prevailing worldview – that the earth is flat or the still center of the turning universe, that humanity begins with Adam and Eve, that the world is enthralled by a dark Demiurge. For the Greeks, mythos was the spirit of the play, familiar to the audience yet as unpredictable as the gods in how it would unfold in a fresh drama.
      A myth may be a sacred teaching story that explains how the world came into being – and what is beyond it – and why bad things, as well as good, things happen, and what it means to be human. A myth may justify the ways of gods to humans, or those of humans before their Creator. A myth may introduce you, like the major arcana of tarot, to essential members of your archetypal family: to personified forces at play in your life and your universe.
      A myth may invite you to consider who among the gods defends you, and who has it in for you. A myth may also be a living reality beyond the realm of facts, a source of truth that cannot be confirmed in a laboratory experiment but may be evidenced by the data of raw experience.

      Your dreams can be a nightly screening of gods and archetypes. A dream may be your place of encounter with a Big story that is looking for you. It may call you to a tradition about which you previously knew nothing ."In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his primary, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream," as Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Psychologist Betsy Meador was called to study Inanna and her priestess after a dream that involved the prayer flags of the great Sumerian goddess, Queen of Heaven and Earth, that were previously unknown to her.
       I was seized by Kali in a terrifying night vision – beginning with sleep paralysis – when I was fourteen. I wrote a cycle of poems in her honor. Later her brother-consort Kala, better known as Yama, became one of my principal mentors, reminding me to consider every life choice in the presence of Death. A little-known Celtic deity came into my ken in a series of dreams in which I was defending my property with a long-handled hammer, like a weaponized croquet mallet. Some shelf elf produced a Gallo-Roman statue of a god with a similar hammer, named in the inscription as Sucellos, which means the Good Striker. He seems to share some qualities with Thor. He is also the consort of a great goddess of abundance, called Rosmerta by the Gauls and Abundantia by the Romans.

       We confirm our relationship with a patron deity, or power animal, when it comes to our aid. Athena came to me like this in Anatolia. The Bear has come to me like this many times since it claimed me when I found the courage to step back into the space of a dream where it had terrified me.

       Myths are a cauldron of stories and symbols that hold superabundant energy for life. You want to become conscious of the myth you are living. If you are unconscious about this, then the myth is living you and you may be driven into confusion and disaster, like Odysseus when his men lose control of the winds. In different phases of life, we may inhabit – and be inhabited by – different myths. We may find ourselves in the play of rival stories. We may be able to match and mix.
        The great scholar of religions Wendy Doniger writes about the “seed text”, bija mantra. In her book Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India, she describes how she found this in the story of an Indian goddess, Saranyu, who cloned herself in order to get away from a husband she detested, leaving a compliant Hindu version of a Stepford Wife at home while she ranged free as a wild mare. This story kept after Doniger for decades, prompting her to reach deeper and deeper into its well. Whenever she heard it, she would say, “That’s the story of my life.” 

      “Myth, by design, makes it clear that we are meant to be something more than our personal history,” declared P.L.Travers, the author of Mary Poppins.

       The myths we are living now swing on hinges into other lives, whose myths swing back at us. Because our present life dramas are connected with those of other personalities, in other places and times, within our multidimensional family, it is not surprising that “old” gods and “dead” religions feature in our spontaneous mythology, as mediated by dreams and visions and by moments on the roads of this world when we experience a hidden hand, pushing us forward or holding us back, or rearranging the stage set.

Art: Frantisek Kupka, "The Path of Silence"

The Shelf Elf School of Dream Interpretation

Shelf elves are constantly at play in my book-filled life. They may push a book off my shelves, or hide one, or send one flying across the room. Sometimes they want to give me an opinion on a dream. I woke before dawn one morning from this dramatic scene:

Battle of the Turtles and the Crocodile

There is a commotion outside. I go to the window and see an army is encamped along the edge of a body of water where a battle is taking place between a giant turtle (the size of a dozen men) and a giant crocodile. I call to the others to come and see. When I turn back, I see that the army has saved the turtle, which is being transported to safer waters. They have constructed or opened a kind of raceway, and the turtle is swimming between walls. Now I see that there are actually two giant turtles.

    I look out to the water again. Beyond military lines, the crocodile stands on a headland, tail raised like a scorpion, apparently triumphant for now. I understand that the conflict will be resumed. It’s part of life. The role of the army is to ensure that neither party destroys the other.

I left the dream feeling both excited and satisfied. In the dream, I was an observer with a commanding view. I felt that I was being shown something of huge importance in life.

    I know both Turtle and Crocodile as members of my personal mythic bestiary. I have swum with sea turtles, and I am from a country famous for crocodiles. I know that in life, there are contests between opposing forces and attitudes that must continue if life itself is to go on.

     Instead of spending much time analyzing the dream, I made a quick drawing and decided to ask Jung for a second opinion. Who better? I had already had it in mind to do my daily bibliomancy with Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a book of seminal importance in my life and the most personal and accessible of his works. 

     However, when I reached into the Jung section in a glass-fronted bookcase in my personal library, the shelf elves had other ideas. Another volume in Jung’s Collected Works came flying off the shelf, striking me lightly on the chest.

    Naturally, I changed my ideas about where to look for guidance and took this flying book to my desk. Its title is Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, which seemed to match the revelation of the two turtles in my dream rather nicely. The volume is a dual edition of two of Jung’s early essays, volume 7 in the Collected Works. I opened the book at random and read this:

There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind…Repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible…Just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.

     I saw that there was no need to invent a snapper to carry the essence of my dream. Jung had given me one. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.

     This little incident is a practical example of how we can turn to a book to give us a second opinion on a dream. Our curiosity may, of course, take us far beyond the initial passage we find when we open a book at random. I found myself drawn, irresistibly, to read both of the essays in that volume of Jung, in which we find his mind devising and developing theories of aspect psychology, the shadow, and the relations between the ego-self and the collective unconscious, which were to become fundamental to his approach.

I went looking in an old journal for my drawing of the battle of the turtles and the crocodile to post with this article. I found the relevant journal fairly quickly. But as I pulled it off the shelf another journal, bound in green leather, shot off the shelf above it and slapped my shoulder. Yes, I will spend some time with the journal that was thrown at me. A sketch on the first page immediately catches my attention.
     As I rise from my desk, green journal in hand, to make coffee, I am pretty sure I can hear mumbling and squeaking among the stacks of my personal library.

Text adapted from SidewalkOracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing by RM

Flying with the Library Angel

It was probably that literate spirit Arthur Koestler called the  Library Angel who was my unseen companion on that passage in the Bardo of Air Travel. My in-flight reading was Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, an excellent study of how Shakespeare rose from obscure origins. After I took my aisle seat, the fellow by the window asked how I was enjoying the book. Quite soon he was telling me how he was in Stratford the previous year when the news broke that a hitherto unknown portrait of Shakespeare had been identified in an Irish country house and was then on its way to the bard's birthplace.

    My literate rowmate proved to be an artist and glass-blower. He gave me his card, which included the following self-description:

Artist
pilgrim
bon vivant

This was one of the best three word self-definitions I had come across. He asked me to define my own work, and then asked me to explain the application of Active Dreaming techniques to healing. I spoke of how dreams diagnose illness and can be a factory of imagery for self-healing when symptoms develop, I recounted some personal experiences of growing and then transferring healing images to cancer patients. With deep emotion, the man told me he was flying to the West Coast to support a family member who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He jotted down the book titles I had mentioned.
      Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a young man who took the seat between us. More introductions ensued. The young man told us he was a vocalist who had sung with his college choir across the British Isles, and in many other places.
      I asked him whether it is true that composers tend to look down on librettists to the extent suggested in Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, which I had finished the night before. He was unfamiliar with the novel, so I explained the plot, which turns on the creative pains and misadventures of an unlikely crew who set about trying to make an opera out of sketches by Hoffmann, with an entirely new libretto, while the long-dead composer watches from the limbo of composers who are waiting for someone to complete their unfinished work.
     "E.T.A. Hoffmann?" the new graduate echoed. "We studied him in my last semester." He gave me a rundown on Hoffmann's musical oeuvre, and asked about Hoffmann's second career as the author of dark fantasy stories, which were based in no small degree on his dreams and nightmares and sightings of apparitions, including several versions of the double or doppelganger.
    He spoke of a piece his choir had sung in his last concert, with lyrics from Goethe. His face fell when he added that the brilliant young composer was struggling with cancer. He had heard the tail end of my account of using dreams to develop imagery to help cancer patients, and asked me to repeat the book details.
    The bookish spirit with us on the flight was notably literate, far-traveled and caring.

Photo: Robertson Davies, marvelous Canadian novelist and sometime master of Massey College.

Fresh Words

The Inuit say that we need to entertain the spirits, including our own creative spirits, and that one of the best ways to do this is to produce “fresh words.”

   They help prevent our gods from becoming tired and dried up in the way that Rilke warned about in “Migration des Forces”, one of the poems he wrote in French:

Certains de nos dieux s’épuisent et se dessèchent,

arides, ankylosés;

dans d’autres, en murmurant, se jette la source fraiche

d’une divinité reposée.

My free version:

Some of our gods become tired and dried up,

sterile and stiff-jointed;

so into others, murmuring, rushes the fresh spring

of a refreshed divinity.

Drawing of Rilke I placed in my journal when I was 19.

    Among the Inuit, the strongest shamans are also the most gifted poets. One of the reasons their spirit helpers flock around them is that they are charmed and exhilarated by the angakok’s poetic improvisations. Inuit shamans have a language of their own, which is often impenetrable to other Eskimos. It is a language that is never still. It bubbles and eddies, opening a whirlpool way to the deep bosom of the Sea-goddess, or a cavernous passage into the hidden fires of Earth. 
    Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that through the play of words, sung or spoken, the magic of the Real World comes dancing into the surface world. The right words open pathways between the worlds. The poetry of consciousness delights the spirits. It draws the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us closer.

    Yaminahua shamans in Peruvian Amazonia use complex, opaque metaphorical language in their power songs, which are their most important tools for journeying and opening an interactive space with the spirits – and for bringing energy and healing through. This is called, literally, “twisting-twisting words”. One shaman explains that with ordinary words, you’ll “crash” in this deeper reality; “twisting words” let you circle around and see.
    Wherever the old ways of dreaming and soul healing are still alive, poets of consciousness - those born and dreamed to be our shamans and Speakers - know what this means.We'll never be able to travel the song lines and the story lines into the space where worlds are made and can be recreated until we come up with our own fresh words.
    We need fresh and twisting words to change and twist the behavior of the body, in the direction of health, and to re-weave tangled or torn energy webs. We need to twist and shout our way out of the boxes, constructed by limited and self-limiting belief systems, that we sometimes mistake for home.

Photo at top: Fox Crossing on the Metuje River in Bohemia by RM

Einstein demonstrates the source of synchronicity

The best explanation of synchronicity I know comes from Albert Einstein. More than an explanation, it is a demonstration, and it came to me in a dream, one of a sequence in which “my” Einstein mentored me on the nature of reality.
    I’m not megalomaniac enough to think that the actual Einstein would bother with someone who knows as little about hard science as I do. Yet the Einstein character who appears in my dream says that he talks to me for two reasons. The first is that dreaming is at the heart of real science, something that will be better understood as we go deeper into the 21st century. The second is that dreaming is the key to time travel, which Dream Einstein says is the most dangerous and most potent thing that humans will ever to get to experiment with; the experiments must be done properly.

    I spend little time and energy questioning whether my Dream Einstein is the individual intellect or spirit of Einstein or a part of me that dresses up like Einstein or some teaching figure in costume. I like the idea that our guides and teachers have access to a cosmic costume department. Whoever my dream Einstein is he talks to me in a stage German accent, sometimes at machine gun speed about things like the physics of time travel and the code of the I Ching, which he once told me is the best model of the universe commonly available and accessible.
    Here is how Einstein demonstrated the source of synchronicity.

    In my dream, a passage opens like a long cylinder lined with silver and bronze-colored rods angling up into the sky. I shoot up effortlessly through this tube. I become aware I’m about to encounter someone who can instruct me on the workings of time and the content of the future.
    I come out high above the ground and look up at a huge revolving structure; something like a Ferris wheel on its side or a giant fun park Tilt-a-Whirl. At the end of each spoke is a different object, a rather bundle of objects. As the wheel revolves, I noticed that the spokes go up and down at all angles making the general shape of a sphere.
    At the hub of the wheel is Einstein. He appears with wild fluffy hair, rumpled clothes as he’s appeared in my other dreams. From the center he works an engine that enables him to toss down bundles from the ends of the spokes. As one spoke dips another rises producing a seesaw effect. As a bundle falls to earth, it explodes like a piñata, scattering its contents over space and time. The source of synchronicity is the firing of a probability bundle, a package whose effects will be observed over a variable period of time but have their origin in a single throw.
     Since Einstein’s demonstration, when I notice a riff of coincidence, things popping up that you know are connected though there is no causation involved in the physical plane, I think of these probability bundles fired from another world into this one to burst across our space and time like multidimensional piñatas. A bundle is also quantum. Quantum means bundle or packet. So the cosmic Tilt-a-Whirl from which bundles are fired may be a model for how quantum effects are manifested on a human scale.
      The idea takes us all the way back to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who said the deepest logic of our life is a child playing with game pieces on a board beyond this world. The child is divine, and as it plays with the pieces in another reality, events and people are moved on the game board of this world.

Statue of a Franciscan hitting a star-shaped piñata in Acolman, Mexico by Alejandro Linares Garcia, curiously evocative of Einstein's probability bundles.