You Are Magnetic

 

Whatever you think and feel, the universe says Yes. The more strongly you think and feel, the stronger and faster the response it likely to be. It may come in ways you do not expect, since quite often you are unaware of the thoughts and desires you are carrying below your surface mind. The response may knock you back because you live in a world of contending energies and the force lines of your hopes and fears and ambitions may excite opposition.
     You may be frustrated because you have been drilling yourself to think yourself rich or successful or forty pounds lighter and the universe is not giving you any encouragement. That may be because your greater Self is uninterested in your ego agendas or flat out against them. It may be because what the grocery lists of wants and needs you put together in your little everyday calculating mind have nothing much to do with what stirs your soul.
     “All things which are similar and therefore connected, are drawn to each other’s power,” according to the medieval magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. It is a rule of reality that we attract or repel different things according to the emotions, the attitudes, the feelings, the agendas that we carry.
     Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you. If you go about your day filled with doom and gloom, the world will give you plenty of reasons to support that attitude. You’ll start looking like that cartoon character who goes about with a personal black cloud over his head that rains only on his parade. Conversely, if your attitude is bright and open to happy surprises, you may be rewarded by a bright day, even when the sky is leaden overhead, and by surprisingly happy encounters.
     Through energetic magnetism, we attract or repel people, events, and even physical circumstances according to the attitudes we embody. This process begins before we speak or act because thoughts and feelings are already actions and our attitudes are out there ahead of us. This requires us to do a regular attitude check, asking, What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?
     It is not sufficient to do this on a head level. We want to check what we are carrying in our body and our energy field. If you go around carrying a repertoire of doom and gloom, you may not say what’s on your mind, but the universe will hear you and support you. Attitude adjustment requires more than reciting the kind of New Age affirmation you see in cute boxes with flowers and sunsets on Facebook. It requires deeper self-examination and self-mobilization.
     “We are magnets in an iron globe,” declared Emerson. If we are upbeat and positive, “we have keys to all doors....The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.” Conversely, “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst ...dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.”
     In Beauty - The Invisible Embrace John O’Donohue reminded usthat “each of us is responsible for 'how' we see, and how we see determines 'what' we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of vision is shaped by the state of soul. When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The old habits of seeing are broken. The coating of dead dust falls from the windows. Freed from their dead forms the elements of one's life reveal new urgency and possibility."
      Take a few moments in your day to check your attitude and see whether you are putting bright balloons of possibility or dour grey clouds over your head.

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

Photo by RM

 

Chancing an Encounter

 

The Book of the Road (Putnik) was on a list of banned books in Tsarist Russia. It was a treatise that attributed high importance to chance encounters. It reflected traditional beliefs about whether it is lucky or unlucky to meet certain kinds of people on the road. To meet a nun, a priest or a blind man is unlucky. To meet someone on a bridge or threshold is ominous  Such views were deeply rooted in traditional Russian culture, even in the mind of Tsars. Ivan the Terrible thought it was a terrible omen if anyone crossed his path when he was setting out on a journey and had such offenders killed. [1]
      I am more in sympathy with the Greek saying that the gods love to travel in disguise, so we should take care of strangers.
     “Mind attracts mind.” Jung observed that this principle is at work in chance encounters where more than chance seems to be involved. Jung described what happened when a stranger sat down next to him on a train. The stranger was a general. “We talked, and although he did not know who I was, he told me all about his dreams, which is certainly unusual for a man of his position. The general considered that his dreams were absurd, but after listening to him, I told him that one of his dreams had changed his whole life, and that otherwise he would have been an intellectual.
      “The general was startled and looked at me as though I were a witch, or at least a person gifted with second sight. But in reality, it was the unconscious which was knowing and directing. The general had sat down next to me because he was unconsciously searching for an answer.” [2]
     Jung felt the general was called to sit next to him because something deeper than his conscious mind was calling for a mentor, to help him make his dreams conscious.
     My friend Carol, a family counselor and addictions counselor or great wisdom and compassion, encountered an elderly man who was praying for an angel.
      Carol went to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription. There were some problems with the paperwork and she was feeling quite grumpy. When she came out into the parking lot she noticed an elderly man pushing a shopping cart, unsteadily, towards his car. When he reached his car, he left the cart by the trunk, still filled with his purchases, and slumped into the driver’s seat, leaving his door open.
    “I knew something was wrong,” Carol told me. “I sat in my car as three people walked past the old man. Then I knew I had to check on him.”
    She walked over to the old man and said, “Do you need some help?”
    “Well, yes. I did ask if you could use some help.”
    “You’re not gonna believe this. Right before you showed up, I was sitting here praying to God to send me an angel. Could you put my shopping in the trunk for me?”
     “ I would be happy to do that.”
      The old man popped the trunk and Carol loaded his shopping bags. The contents felt soft Carol guessed the bags contained products like Depends, for older people whose bodies are failing. She noticed a walker, folded, and two canes in the trunk.
     “I came out too soon,” the old man told her when she had finished loading. He did not explain exactly what this meant, but he told Carol that he was the caregiver for his wife. They were both ninety years old and they had been married for seventy years.
     “Are you sure you can drive home safely?” Carol asked.
    “I’ll be okay. I know there is an angel watching over me.”
    Carol commented later, “If I was an everyday angel for him in that parking lot, he was a kind of angel for me. I felt happy and blessed by this encounter. All my grumpiness was gone.”   
.    Chance encounters may not be caused, in the sense of being made by appointment, but they may be called.

Travel by train, as Jung found, or by airplane can provide almost ideal conditions for a chance encounter with a stranger that may lead to extraordinary things. People are on the move – which may help release them from routine inhibitions – and at the same time the circumstances are contained and relatively “safe”. Contact need last no longer than the ride or the wait at the station or departure gate. 
     On a train in the mountains of Sweden in 1904,a dispirited young Danish artist, Emilie Demant, found herself questioning her calling yet again. A stranger struck up conversation. He was a Sami wolf hunter and trapper named Johan Turi He told Emilie he had a dream of writing a book about the Sami, famous as a shamanic people of the drum. She moved to Sami country and helped him to produce the book and in the process matured into a brilliant artist and a pioneer Sami-speaking female ethnographer, the author of important books from her own fieldwork and fatherig of stories from the grandmothers. Pre-pandemic, chance encounters during my almost constant air travel were a great compensation for missed connections, long layovers, and aching knees. I found strangers willing to open up, drawn together to commiserate about delays or share travelers’ tales. Many clearly felt an active desire to tell and listen to stories, if only to shorten the seeming duration of a flight or a layover.
     Generally, I did not initiate conversation unless I had a positive feeling about the person sitting next to me, or was intrigued by the title of the book they are reading. Often my neighbor on a plane would be the first to speak, especially when I was carrying one of my own books.
     I will never forget the matriarch who took the seat next to me after settling her extended family in various parts of the airplane cabin. She noticed the beautiful cover of the second edition of my book Dreamgates and asked if she could look at it. Naturally, I handed it over. Opening the book at random, she found herself reading a section headed “Designing Your Home on the Other Side.”
     She turned to me in high excitement. “Is that really possible?” she demanded.
     I told her “Absolutely.”
     I explained the group adventures I lead in which we have observed how the creative imagination constructs living environments – and cities, universities and pleasure domes – on the other side of physical death.
    “I will buy this book as soon as possible!” the elegant matriarch declared. “I have spent twenty five years creating a jewel of a home in Carmel, California. I am going to be spending a lot longer in my next residence, and I want to get it right.”

My favorite, indelible experience of a chance encounter on a plane was my ride with the Death's Head Dominatrix.  It left me in no doubt that forces from behind the veil of consensual reality were in play and that, truly, there are things that like to happen together. The episode still gives me delicious shivers.

1. W.F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia. University Park, PA :Penn State University Press,: 2011) 123-4.

2. Jung in conversation with Miguel Serrano, September 1960. Reprinted in C.G. Jung Speaking ed. W.McGuire and R.F.C.Hull (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) 464-465.

3. Barbara Sjoholm, "The Art of Recalling: Lapland and the Sami in the Art of Emilie Demant Hatt in Feminist Studies vol 40,no.2 (2014) 356-393

 

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

Journal drawing: "Airport Lady of the Veil" by Robert Moss

The Goddess and the Peacock

A dream report from last summer popped out of my journal and I see that it offers a portal for mythic exploration. My initial research took me to ancient Mesopotamia and a contemporary persecuted religion. There is more dream archaeology to be done with this.

August 4, 2020

Dream

Peacocks Fan Me

I am looking at a beautiful frieze carved in sandstone or alabaster. Are those lotus blossoms? There are reeds and lush vegetation. I suppose that once the scene was painted in bright colors. It starts to come alive. To my amazement and delight, peacocks step out of the frieze and fan me with their tails, a welcome breeze in the warm sunshine of the courtyard

A priestess is near me, seated on a bench, a light robe pinned at her shoulder. She wears a jeweled headband and a star. She is holding a moist tablet, wax or clay. She makes a notation and assures me that being fanned by peacocks is a very good sign.

Reentry: I stay with the dream and try to go back in. I want to check on the star and to find out more about the priestess. Her eyes are rimmed with thick bands of malachite blue, giving her the aspect of an intent bird

“You may call me Nanshe,” she says. I am humbled. This is the name of a Sumerian goddess. What have I done to earn her personal attention?

“You honored me with fresh poetry. This is the best offering you could bring. It pleases my sister Nisaba too.”

I want to pursue the symbolism of the peacocks. I have heard that only the male peacock has the cherubim tail of many eyes, and opens it only as a show of strength, especially when facing off other males in the mating season.

“The peacock reveals his splendor to honor the goddess,” she tells me. “And to open portals to other worlds.”

Feelings: Excited, intrigued, blessed.

Reality check: I have been close to peacocks in several European countries, including Ireland. I recall that peacocks feature in the auras of Indian deities.

I remember that in Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful novel A Wind in the Door a "singular cherubim" covered with eyes like a peacock tail provides the portal for travel to other dimensions.

Peacocks, in Mesopotamia? My inner fact-checker wanted to investigate right away.

Immediate research: I found that in Old Babylonian the word for “peacock” is also the name of a god, Haya, the consort of Nisaba, the goddess of writing and grain. Apparently this peacock god is himself no slouch at the scribal arts. l

The Peacock Angel (Tawûsê Melek) is central to Yazidi religion, and some believe he is a version of the ancient Mesopotamian god Dumuzi/Tammuz. In art and sculpture, Tawûsê Melek – king of archangels - is depicted as peacock. Though peacocks are not native to the lands where Tawûsê Melek is worshipped., peacock imagery spreads like the bird's tail over shrines, gateways, graves, and places of worship. The Yazidis have been persecuted as "devil worshippers" by Islamic extremists.

The Peacock Angel 

I go back to the night before the peacock dream and find this in my journal:

August 3, 2020

Hypnopompic Encounter

Ninhursag

The name is clear and definite, stamped in fresh black letters on a white field as I exit my dreams at 4 am.

I try to see where it is coming from. I am looking down into what may be an archaeological dig, at objects partly obscured by dust and clay. An undulating spinal column, perhaps of a snake. A pointed helmet on a skull. A metallic scorpion or dagger shaped like one. Figures from the impression of a cylinder seal: lion, bull, bull man, a deity with thunderbolts. A stone ax, perhaps a thunder stone. A star connection I cannot track to a system I can name.

In a preceding dream I was seeking to limit a power - perhaps a spell - so it did not cause chaos and block the streets. 

I am reminded that in some genealogies, Ninhursag is the mother of Nanshe, a goddess of dreams and the sea and social justice. The act of generation is really strange, It unfolds in an Edenic garden where Enki has sex not only with Ninhursag but with their daughter and granddaughter Uttu  Ninhursag intercedes at round 3, draws Enki’s semen out of Uttu and pours it into the earth, where it generates trees and plants. Returning to the garden, Enki finds all this tended new growth delicious and devours all the plants. 

Now Ninhursag displays the full wrath of the Great Mother. She fixes the Eye of Death on him, and the god starts to die. Nothing can heal him except Ninhursag, the life bringer who has now brought death. Taking pity on him – or noting his continued usefulness – she arranges his body so his head is at, and maybe inside, her vagina. He is restored and the plants come back as deities including Nanshe. Now one of her titles is Lady of the Rib. One of Enki’s injuries was to a rib. More significantly, in wordplay the ancient Sumerian/Akkadian word for “rib” also means to “give life”.

I am moved to write a little hymn for Nanshe

For Nanshe, Dream Opener

Lady of dark waters
born in the first garden
the Mother made you for healing
you speak the language of birds
you bring fish from the deep
you call kings to give justice
to the poor and oppressed
you see into the hearts of men
as if they are split reeds

Dream opener, highly prized
open the gates of dream for us
come to us as a gentle breeze
or a wild goose on the wing
show us how to read
the handwriting of the gods

Nanshe with geese. Third dynasty of Ur

Until my journal retrieval just now, I had lost the chronology. I see that I wrote this poem the night before Nanshe appeared in the unexpected luster of the peacock plumes and told me "You honored me with fresh poetry".

Mercury/Hermes as Peacock Boat

Peacock Tales Fan Out

Myths have a thousand faces, in collective as well as personal dreams. They fan out like the peacock's tail. Scholars believe that peacocks were unknown in the Hellenic world until Alexander the Great brought some back from India or Persia. Aristotle knew the peacock as a "Persian" bird. Then suddenly we hear that the peacock is the animal companion of Hera, especially at her temple on the island of Samos, where she was greatly reverenced. With his Metamorphoses Ovid carries the story throughout the Greco-Roman world that Juno (Hera) created the splendor of the peacock' s tail by sowing it with the glowing eyes of Argus.
      A century or two later we hear the story that the soul of Homer transmigrated into a peacock, a bird unknown to him in his lifetime. That tale sprang from a dream of the Roman poet Ennius.
     And the tales keep fanning out. To celebrate the wedding of a Medici prince, Cosimo II, in 1608, a pageant was staged on the river Arno. Among the floats was a giant peacock that carried actors playing Aethalides, herald of the Argo, and two of his fellow-Argonauts. The peacock was supposedly a form taken by Aethalides' father, Hermes/Mercury. Where that association came from will require further dream archaeology.[1]
       Two years after the peacock god appeared on the river, Peter Paul Rubens painted Ovid's blood-drenched story of Hera giving the peacock the eyes of Argus, her murdered watchman. We see clearly how the eyes in the peacock feathers are a symbol of vision. Rubens composes his picture in a blazing chord of primary colors: blue, yellow and red. The rainbow arch evokes the whole spectrum of light. 

Peter Paul Rubens, "Juno and Argus"

[1] Catalogue copy for the Peacock Boat: "The Argonauts Eurytus, Echion, and Aethalides (Eurito Echione e Etalide Argonote), led by Mercury [Hermes] in the form of a peacock, from the series 'The magnificent pageant on the river Arno in Florence' for the marriage of the Grand Duke'.

Illustration at top by RM

 

Acts of Creation

 

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.
    For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

A high tolerance for ambiguity is a characteristic of highly creative people. This increases our ability to think outside the box, make connections others can't see, and escape from either/or choices..We grow our tolerance for ambiguity when we share dreams in the right way and receive feedback from multiple perspectives - and find that every viewpoint has something to offer. Active dreamers are capable of checking all the boxes when given multiple choices.

Great creators in all fields are dreamers, not only in sleep but in twilihght states of reverie where connections that escape the ordinary rational mind come easily and contact with higher intelligence is often made. Robert Louis Stevenson said he received his stories in a state of “reverie” in which benign visitors he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
      Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, said that dreams were his “secret laboratory.” Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kekulé, – and Newton in his own day, and Hypatia in hers – were all dreamers. They drew inspiration from sleep dreams and developed the ability to slip into twilight states of consciousness

Other habits of creative people: 

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They are visual thinkers.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere. 

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim. 

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture, we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times, and a greater Self. We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.

Yeats wrote about what it required to engage the daimon with quivering passion in his essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The title means “The Friendly Silence of the Moon”. He borrowed it from Virgil's description of the Greeks approaching Troy by stealth. Under the poet's moon, Yeats explains how we  can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times and on other planes of reality. 

Yeats believed, as I do, that whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by a larger self he called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose.

The daimon loves us best, Yeats said, when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

Art: "The Red Tree" by Robert Moss

 

 

Always coming home to the Goddess

Ribeirão da Ilha, Santa Catarina, Brazil

On my first night on Santa Catarina Island, I dreamed I was introducing people to the Great Mother Goddess, counseling them to treat her with respect.
    On my last day on the island, I agreed with my host that we would take a drive around the bay side, to an area of Azorean fishing villages and oyster beds. The drive was wonderful. On the forested hills, indigenous garapuvu trees put up vivid yellow canopies, like floral umbrellas.
    Just short of the village of Ribeirão da Ilha, I saw a wonderful female figure in a flowing blue gown, arms raised, a star in her hair.
    "Stop the car," I said to my friend. "That's Yemanjá." I gave the great goddess of the sea and of motherhood her Brazilian name. In Spanish-speaking countries she is Yemaya. In both versions, her name is a contraction of the Yoruba phrase yeye omo eja, meaning, "mother whose children are like fish." The phrase evokes her endless fecundity; she embodies the sea of life, immense and universal and giving and forgiving.
    In other parts of Brazil, her presence by the water would be no surprise. Hundreds of thousands of people gather by the sea in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia for her festivals. But here in the south, I was in a very white part of Brazil, settled by Germans, Austrians and Italians after the Portuguese sent early colonists from the Azores; signs of the Afro-Brazilian tradition had been absent until now.
     We noticed a sign across the street from Yemanjá, for the Ilé de Shangó, the temple of Shangó, the thunderer among the Orixás, the African gods who crossed the Atlantic with those brought to the New World in captivity. We crossed the road and were greeted by a friendly, maternal black woman who proved to be a filha de Shangó (a daughter of Shangó). She gave us an informal tour of the temple and explained that it had required a long campaign to get permission from conservative, white town fathers to place a statue of a black goddess at the edge of the bay. Pleased by my enthusiasm and my familiarity with some elements of her tradition, she invited me to take off my shoes and enter the sanctuary, where I was received with kisses and embraces as one of the family.
    I studied photographs of the pai de ilé (the father of the temple) with drummers in Nigeria, and recalled how, thirty years ago, I nearly gave up my familiar life to go to West Africa to be trained and initiated in this tradition.
    The priestess expanded her tour to the kitchen, where her daughter-in-law was nursing a baby, and showed us the pots used for cooking for the feasts that accompany their nights of ritual. I thanked her, and the Great Mother by the bay, with respect, for what felt like a happy homecoming.
   I had been uneasy until now about my return flights to the United States, receiving broken reports of the progress of Hurricane Sandy. I now relaxed, feeling all would be well. All three of my flights went almost impossibly smoothly; I arrived a few minutes early at my home airport, on Halloween.
   On my first night home, I dreamed again of a Great Mother, in a different guise, this time as a Native American spirit woman who opened and held a marvelous space for healing within the gathering I am leading on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks next weekend.
   As I look over my wanderings in this world, and the traffic from the mythic world that is forever part of this story, I see I am always coming home to the Goddess.

From my pre-pandemic travel journal. This episode unfolded when I was teaching in Brazil in 2011. Obviously it was not my first encounter with Yemanja.
   

 

"Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed": a tribute to Jung

I have studied Jung's Red Book and read most of his recently-published Black Books, but Memories, Dreams, Reflections is the book I most treasure by this great depth psychologist and dream traveler and the one I constantly recommend to those who are just starting to explore his work. Here is a modest tribute.

I discovered Jung in high school and devoured many volumes of his Collected Works when I was an undergraduate, though I probably failed to digest the most difficult passages. In the midst of the psychic storms of 1987-8, I turned to Jung again, to see how he made sense of his own "confrontation with the unconscious". My main source book was Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his life story as recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé based on conversations he began when he was eighty-one.
     His great life crisis began in 1912, after his break with Freud. For several years, he lived in a house of the spirits. The contents of his dreams and visions seemed to be spilling over into his physical life, producing poltergeist-like phenomena and apparitions that his children could see. Night after night, he descended into a dark and thrilling Underworld where he met mythic characters who seemed to him to be entirely real and transpersonal. He often felt he was under an avalanche of psychic events, "as if gigantic stones were tumbling down upon me." His survival required him to draw on a "demonic strength" that brilliant, mad Nietzsche  had lacked.
    He kept seeing patients, but stopped lecturing at the university and ceased publishing for three years, no longer confident that he could make sense of things for other people. He had no mentor now, in the ordinary world. He sought stability through his family, his continuing work with clients, through painting and through "hewing stone", building a miniature stone village that he thought he was making in collaboration with his eleven-year-old self.
    He realized that he had to reclaim beginner's mind. He said to himself, "Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me." Then he took the shaman's plunge. "I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious." 
    Central to Jung's ability to restore his inner compass was his daily recording of dreams. Now divorced from theory, his main preoccupation was to set down an unedited, uncensored chronicle of his experiences. "Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed." This was one of his central discoveries, and it is one of the most helpful statements that has ever been made about dreams and dreamwork. Let's start with the facts of the dream, leaving aside theory until we have recovered as much of the experience as possible.
     This was confirmation for me of the method I was obliged to improvise in my own time of testing. I journaled my dreams and visions as exactly as possible, giving each a title noting the time and duration of each experience. I most required clarity when my experiences rebuffed interpretation and linear thinking. I found it essential to disentangle the reports of inner adventures from other material so that their nature and content was not blurred. I underlined Jung's statement that "otherwise the material would have trapped me in its thicket, strangled me like jungle creepers" and put a big check mark in the margin. Exactly right.
    In his storms of emotion, Jung sought to let images take form. Images gave him a way to work with the raw power of emotion rather than being torn apart by it. He was learning how to harvest images and rework them through what he later called "active imagination" in the laboratory of his own psyche.
    He recorded the facts of his inner experiences even when he found the content nonsensical, repugnant or freakish. In this way, he hoped that instead of being drowned by the contents of his inner life, he would gain a means of navigation. 
    He felt himself pulled into the Underworld. Instead of resisting, he let himself drop and began a harrowing journey of Underworld initiation, played out over years rather than hours, reminiscent of the shaman's path of tests and ordeals. In this time, he found an agreed form for an inner guide: an old man with the horns of a bull and wings of kingfisher blue that he named Philemon. "It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche."
    Near the end of his life, Jung observed that "all my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images." 
    He had had a plan for his life, to become a professor and pursue a scientific line that had seemed clear to him. "But then, I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life." What overthrew his plans and expectations also gave him the prima materia for a greater life work. "That was the primal stuff which compelled me to work upon it, and my works are a more or less successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into the contemporary picture of the world."
    On my own stormy path of initiation in 1987-1988, I felt immense affinity for the great shaman of the West who spoke those words, and took comfort and courage from his example. I felt the deep truth of his ringing assertion that "he who takes the sure path is as good as dead", and spoke those words aloud, as I walked with my dogs to the old white oak behind the house, and scrambled up the slippery banks of the creek to the highest of the waterfalls.

The most important statement for me in Memories, Dreams, Reflections is this:"All day long I have exciting ideas and thoughts. But I take up in my work only those to which my dreams direct me." This is equally true for me.
     Many days a week I embark on research assignments that dreams have given me, often before doing anything else in a day. I dreamed of yesterday of writing a scholarly paper.Since then I have been investigating its subject: the life and mind of Princess Marie Bonaparte, Freud's patient and patron. Popups of synchronicity and the play of shelf elves in my large and lively home library give me further prompts for research when I am dreaming with my eyes open. Jung understood this very well too.

 

The most important book I will ever read

I have kept a dream journal for many decades and I know it is the most important book  that I will ever read. I say this as a voracious reader with a personal library of nearly 14,000 books.
    My journal is my personal encyclopedia of symbols. It is my user's manual for living a fruitful life and choosing wisely between alternate possible futures that my traveling self visits every night. It is my scientific data log for incidents of precognition, telepathy and clairsentience, and for transpersonal experiences in which, for example, two or more people are engaged in the same dream activities. It is my atlas of the multiverse, my magical diary and the core of my personal mythology. It commemorates the nightly screening of gods, archetypes and daimones.
     It is starter dough for creative expression. It is the first and sometimes the best draft of pages that will appear in my books or be shared as stories in my lectures and classes. It is a book of clues, full of curious words and intriguing details that will send me off on research assignments.   

    Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep; it is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. So my journal not only contains reports from sleep dreams, but also from shamanic journeys and special moments of synchronicity when we become vividly aware that ordinary life may be a waking dream. I take particular care to record the impressions that come in the liminal space between sleep and awake. The most important spiritual dialogues of my life have unfolded from contact with inner guides who communicate in this space, and some of my most thrilling adventures in lucid dream travel have taken off from here. 

     My journal reveals continuous lives that I seem to be leading in parallel worlds where I made different life choices. It shows me threads of connection between my present dramas and those of counterpart personalities living in other places and times, and helps me to pull gently on the web, to bind or release. My journal holds up a magic mirror to my attitudes and actions, offering course correction and restoring my inner compass. It helps me to track my progress in the practice of continuity of consciousness. This involves retaining witness perspective and awareness of choice in two or more realities simultaneously, as you cycle through states of sleep, dream, sleep-wake, waking dream and more.
     I may write my first reports of the day with a pencil or a fountain pen, in a beautiful bound journal with archival quality paper that invites me to sketch and to color as well. As soon as possible, however, I'll transcribe my reports into a digital data base. I date and title each report, so I have an instant chronological index. Saving my documents in Word gives me a search engine so if I want to track a theme or a name over all the years - "black dog", "Mircea Eliade", "HG" [hypnagogic] - all I have to do is type it in the box and all the relevant entries are there before me.
     No doubt everything is recorded somewhere - more likely in nonlocal mind than the basement of the personal subconscious - but it is essential (and can be wonderful creative fun) to develop searchable logs of this kind over time. They become the most important scientific data (in the sense of state-specific science, adequate to the field under investigation) in this area that we will ever attain.
     How much to record? My feelings will guide me on the urgency and importance of a dream - and indeed of whatever enter my field of perception - and how much detail I should include in my journal reports. On most days, I don't try record everything I remember from my dreams, just as I don't write down what I ate for breakfast or how many times my dog relieved himself in the park. A map as big as a country is no longer a map, as in the Borges story.
     There are limits to how much even the most dedicated dream journal-keeper can bring back from a night in the multiverse. On some days, my inner guidance is to write down whatever I remember as soon as possible, and let further writing and pattern recognition emerge as I do that. This works really well when I start by drawing something from the dream. On other days, my guidance is to forego journaling altogether in favor of simply writing with the energy and elements my dreams and hypnagogic experiences have given me.

    Some of the things that happen in Dreamland and stay in Dreamland have enduring effects even when we are amnesiac about what happened.