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.

What is Active Dreaming?

Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity.  I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future.
    Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers.

    I work with sleep dreams in all these varieties, and many more, and welcome them to work on me. But Active Dreaming is far more than a method for decoding sleep dreams. While the techniques involved are fresh and original, they are also very ancient. They involve ways of seeing and knowing and healing that were known to our early ancestors, kept them alive on a dangerous planet, and enabled them to communicate with each other and with other forms of life in the speaking land around them.     
    Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found.

    Active Dreaming is a discipline, as is yoga or archaeology or particle physics. This is to say that there are ascending levels of practice. In any field, the key to mastery is always the same: practice, practice, practice.

     Active Dreaming offers three core areas of practice. 
    
First, Active Dreaming is a way of talking and walking our dreams, of bringing energy and guidance from the dreamworld into everyday life. We learn how to create a safe space where we can share dreams of the night and dreams of life with others, receive helpful feedback, and encourage each other to move towards creative and healing action. We discover that each of us can play guide for others, and that by sharing in the right way we claim our voice, grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build stronger friendships and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Above all, we learn to take action to embody the energy and guidance of our dreams in everyday life.  

Second, Active Dreaming is a method of shamanic lucid dreaming.  It starts with simple everyday practice and extends to profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery and the exploration of multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way.
    We learn to embark on conscious or lucid dreaming from the liminal state of awareness known as hynagogia, when we are between sleep and waking, or between waking and sleep. We learn to use the doorway of a remembered dream to embark on a wide-awake and conscious dream journey, traveling back inside the dreamscape to gather more information, dialogue with a dream figure, move beyond fear toward healing and self-empowerment – and have wonderful fun. We learn to travel together in mutual and group adventures in conscious dreaming, journeying into nonordinary reality with one or more partners and bringing back gifts and mutual confirmation.

    As a method of conscious dream navigation, Active Dreaming is not to be confused with approaches that purport to “control” or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak in the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.

Third, Active Dreaming is a way of conscious living. This requires us to reclaim our inner child, and the child’s gift of spontaneity, play and imagination. It requires us to claim the power of naming and define our life project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies. It calls us to remember and tell and live our bigger story in such a way that it can be heard and received by others. It is about navigating by synchronicity and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as clues to a deeper order. Beyond this, it is about grasping that the energy we carry and the attitudes we choose have magnetic effect on the world around us, drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances.

    To live consciously is to accept the challenge to create, which is to move beyond scripts and bring something new into the world.

This approach is not only for individuals and friends and families, but for communities and for our deeper attunement to the cause of the Earth.  Active dreamers become Speakers for the Earth, and rise to full awareness of the truth of the indigenous wisdom that we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. Active dream groups can offer a model of intentional community, and can foster a new mode of leadership that empowers each member to claim her voice and play guide to others as they learn to speak and embody their own truth.

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

Photo: Path of lights at Mosswood Hollow, near Duvall WA, where I lead many dream retreats and trainings.

Churchill, Einstein and the making of immortals

I journeyed through the doorway of a dream, intent on exploring a most interesting locale, an upscale pub-restaurant called The Huntsman's Arms. I confirmed my impression that the pub is a waystation on the Other Side, and had several memorable encounters with deceased family members and friends and with the enigmatic proprietor, the Huntsman himself.
     In my exercise in conscious dream reentry, I noticed Winston Churchill looking in on a gathering in a saloon bar. The former statesman was floating in midair, like a human zeppelin, puffing on his eternal cigar. Over many years, Churchill has been a recurring figure in my imaginal life.

    This sighting prompts me to ask: just who are the great figures of the past who turn up in this way, dead yet seemingly immortal? Who, in the collective psyche, is Princess Diana? Who, in the Catholic imagination, are the saints who are believed still to be working miracles and turning up in visions? Who is the Jung who showed me around the Other Bollingen, a story I recount in Mysterious Realities? Who is the Yeats who has appeared to me in dreams and hypnagogia scores of times, and volunteered to be my"guide to the Other Side", as related in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead?

    Answers are likely to be slippery, because we dream and perceive in so many different ways, on so many levels. Musing on this theme, I found myself reflecting again on my serial dreams of encounters and "thought experiments" with Einstein. In one of my Einstein dreams, the great scientist welcomed me at the wooden gate of a formal Chinese garden. He led me to a tea house and introduced me to Richard Wilhelm, who gave the West the first translation of the I Ching that works for practical purposes of divination. In the course of our conversation, Einstein made reference to a certain "Fechner", a name previously unknown to me.-

    I did some research and found that Gustav Fechner was a German psychologist and physicist of the 19th century, credited with pioneering the science of "psychophysics". Fechner, a firm believer in the soul's survival of physical death, attempted to define the different modes and subtle vehicles in which consciousness can both survive death and make itself known to others. 

    In Richard Wilhelm's lectures on the I Ching I found a note on Fechner's psychophysics of the afterlife that goes to the quick of my inquiry about what is going on when Churchill or Einstein turns up in the imaginal lives of the living. Fechner suggested that after death the departed acquires a "body of immortality" that is "formed in the thoughts of other men...formed by their remembrance of the deceased". This body of immortality is "a body of a higher grade, in which the deceased can continue to live" and appear to the living. The great and famous, whose image in life is magnified by the attention and hopes and beliefs of millions, and whose memory is carried by just as many, could presumably take on a "body of immortality" that would enable them to appear and operate like the demigods of the ancient world or the saints of believers.
     In the midst of these researches - in books and in my journals, on the internet and in the interworld of lucid active dreaming -  I stopped in at my favorite used bookstore.This is one of those happy places where shelf elves are often at play, and are sometimes embodied by the bookseller. The assistant on duty that day - a gentle and mature historian and scholar whose day job is at an area college - chose to recollect, out of the blue, "When I was a boy my father gave me a complete collection of Winston Churchill's speeches, on vinyl of course. I was thrilled by them. My wife put them on disk for me and I've been listening again, and they are no less thrilling. It feels like Churchill is one of those people who can reach across time, into many people's minds."

Art: "The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell" )1962), Churchill's last painting