Dreams – Page 12 – The Dark Knight of the Soul

Posted on June 29, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

Mystical Experience

Many people over the years have shared their unusual experiences, bidden or unbidden, eyes open or eyes closed and all having profound effects on their ordinary state of consciousness. All those who shared seemed to experience a deep sense of connectedness or union with others and/or the environment.

Some people have had these experiences while in deep meditation, through their dreams, or while just walking down the street. There is for all a sense of transcending the self i.e. the ordinary self identified by name and body to a place of communion with something much, much greater.

Some years ago when descending from a hilltop building toward the parking lot below I happened to look out at the dusky glow of the city as it was slowly being cloaked by the evening light. My focus went to the traffic on the street slightly below me and made eye contact with one of the drivers.

Suddenly something else looked out from those eyes driving by. It was a spirit so profound I could only imagine it to be that of God. As I scanned other drivers this same observer looked out and saw a man standing on a hillside about to descend toward a parking lot. I was both seeing them and seeing me through them. The boundary between us disappeared and the stress of the day melted away.

I continued down the embankment with tears in my eyes knowing that something had changed forever in the way I was seeing the world. As I climbed into my car and pulled out of the lot and into the traffic on the street the experience lasted for at least another few minutes, or longer, or shorter, I don’t know because time too had stopped. Fortunately this didn’t last too much longer or I’d no doubt have ended up in a fender-bender.

This is what some philosophers call a mystical experience, though others might label it a brain burp caused by some random misfiring of neurons.

The phenomenology of mysticism was summarized in Borg and Wright’s book The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (Chapter 4 page 61) where a five-part description of a mystical experience was presented.

Borg suggested that the pre Easter Jesus was a mystic and that “If one takes seriously that the sacred can be experienced, and that people who have such experiences frequently and vividly may be called mystics or Spirit persons, then it seems apparent that Jesus was one of these (62-63).”

Though Borg was describing the pre Easter Jesus he was also defining the experience of mysticism and mystics in general. Borg’s description seemed spot on with my own experience as well as those shared by the many people who have written me over the years.

Mystical experience generally involves five characteristics; Ineffability: where the experience can’t really be described through ordinary words, Transiency: where the experience is somewhat brief, Passivity: in that they are usually unbidden, received rather than achieved, the Noetic: produce a knowing of something not known before the experience i.e. a new reality. This may also include a sense of awe and joy. Fifth in the series is that these experiences are Transformative: they transform a person’s way of being in part because they see the world differently after the experience.

For me the experience on the hilltop above the parking lot was one of many I’ve experienced throughout my life all of which have shifted radically my vision of reality. Though my ego-self continues to insist that I view reality through a vision of separateness I know and am able to easily access the “knowing” that has grown from my experiences of the mystical.

I wish that I could share that there was some secret means for accessing the mystical spiritual but all of my experiences have come unbidden though my tendency to give emphasis to such things as dreams, meditations, spiritual, psychological and emotional exploration may have left me more open to them. I have often had a dream or a meditation or rumination that I thought should have produced something deep and profound only to have it reach the level of interesting but hardly awe-inspiring. It’s one of those pieces of “magic” that can’t be made to happen but can be allowed or given room to happen.

Posted on June 12, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

The Mystic’s Journey: A voice in the darkness can lead into the light

Walking in darkness, unseen for he had never beheld the light. He didn’t know it was there because for him there had been only the night.

Walking, walking, a forest path, a city sidewalk, a sandy beach, a mountain trail, then down a slippery slope toward the parking lot something reached in and gripped his heart and stole his mind, turned it inside out and twisted his reality.

And it’s never looked the same, sounded the same, felt the same since.

In each a voice overran the mindless chatter and filled him with a sound so complete, so beautiful, and so loving that he found it hard to breathe and the world gave promise to a way of being beyond all its pretty words.

But as time passed the promise of those extraordinary moments seemed to fade into the darkening mist of the every day.

“What now?” said he, and the voice was still and his heart became darker and the black crept back into his world.

Then a soft and loving breeze came upon him and swirled about and within leaving him with barely heard but solidly felt words of assurance, “You’re on your own now. You have what was once secret but now visible to you no matter where you turn your head. But don’t hold for too long for it’s only yours so long as you keep giving it away.”

At that moment everything changed for everything became an opportunity to give it away and the promise came out of the mist and pointed the way. Giving became getting, letting go was an act of love and he walked out of the darkness and into the sunlight.

What is this darkness of which the young man spoke and what of the light that dispels it?

It is the darkness of unknowing, of the unconscious and of not wanting to know what is beyond the horizon of your mind.

The light is of the flash of knowing, and facing the legions of bogey men that hide in the dark alleys of the unexplored. It is the brilliance that dispels all dark things that go bump in the night. It is your beautiful face long unseen because you turned away too soon, listening to others and to the voice implanted by those who knew only the blackness as well. Alas, we embrace ignorance too easily you and I because it feels safer hiding here in this cave, this waking dream of a frightened mind.

Once in a while after much running in the opposite direction the light blows in and disrupts all our best intentions that often produce the worst results and shakes us to our core, scrambling the carefully built fantasy and opening us to the fearsome reality of real love. Once in a while someone awakes from the dream and can never return to the land of the dark. It is called a mystical experience and those who walk into the light of the experience can never fully return to the cave and become obligated to be of the world instead of just in it.

These are the children of the ecstatic, the modern-day mystics if you will. Often the light is thrust upon them in that they weren’t seeking it, reluctant really, but once enlightened, becoming obligated to share it.

But many times it’s the seeker that finds at their darkest moment, the moment when they have given up the search, the light will grab them and shake them awake.

May the light grab you and shake you awake before it’s too late and you have to do it all over again.

Posted on May 25, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

An answered prayer for change

In response to a prayer not too long ago regarding an entreaty to help with turning around the negativity in the world especially as it relates to the current dark aspects of the American political climate I had a dream.

In the dream I was trying to change the attitude of a dark man who was being very skeptical. I was trying to get him to turn away from his criminality. Later I was told to clean up old washing machines lying helter-skelter in some field.

Basically the dream was presenting me with my own dark side, or shadow, and suggesting that I needed to deal with it as well, that the problem lay also with me and not just the outside world. What I needed to do was to clean up old and no longer useful machinery i.e. ways of being and thinking.

There were other parts of the dream where I was looking for ways to not take the blame for things, in other words ducking responsibility. This made me look to where I was not willing to be responsible for my less desirable and unhelpful traits.

Though I was praying for an answer to my feelings of helplessness, the dream turned that around by empowering me to deal with my own negative contributions to what was being manifest in the greater world.

This dream is an example of the mirror aspect of dreams in that a dream is like standing before a mirror and seeing yourself more directly and clearly. So too the world about us is a mirror to ourselves both in what we admire and what we reject, in what makes us proud and in what we fear.

Often the outside world reflects our own growth or need for growth. We tend to ignore our own flaws by projecting them onto others. By being outwardly critical we may also be passive aggressively self-critical.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

― C.G. Jung

I believe that Jung’s statement is especially true in our dreams. Essentially I believe that we are not what happens to us but what we have chosen to become and that to some degree the outside world reflects that. To varying degrees the world we see and react to reflects some part of ourselves admired or rejected. In short, we can do little to change the outside if we aren’t willing or ready to change the inside.

As I wrote this and shared it with a friend they pointed out to me that this may also be the message from Mathew 7: 3-5:

³“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Always good advice I thought but though they sound similar, the difference in the motivation behind each may give some insight into their usefulness in that the biblical entreaty uses a key word i.e. “hypocrite” that suggests a liar and deceiver, a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings implying a wrong doing that needs to be corrected in order to meet a religious expectation or to change the behavior of someone outside oneself. This is not the motivation behind Jung’s quote where he believes that we can use our prejudices and judgments of others to better understand ourselves and not as a means of changing something outside ourselves that you can’t do anyway.

Posted on May 6, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

Saturn’s Child

Eat your heart out by– Brandon Henning (devientart.com)

On occasion I have written about the phenomenon I call “eating the heart”–self-judgment and depression. Most of the time I can see that there is no real cause for this mood–no real reason to feel depressed, or reason for self-flagellation, so I just let it be. Some of the time I resist it because it robs me of feeling good about myself and being happy in the world. And all of the time I don’t much care for it. What I haven’t done is to embrace it.

What the ancients called “coming into Saturn,” or being Saturn’s Child is an expression of soul as much as is happiness. For me, depression and self-judgment has provided the energy to look deeper into the meaning of my life and to explore what it means to be fully human. I don’t want to make my shadow a friend, but I don’t want to ignore, or deny it either. Being whole and complete means to embrace (and accept responsibility for) everything that you are and are not. I don’t want to be a shallow personality, but this has a price in that more often than I care to I fall under Saturn’s spell.

Is it possible that depression is not always an evil neurosis to be mechanically controlled through medication and/or counseling? It is possible that the soul is more than just goodness and purity, that it is dark fantasy as well. It is also possible that the process of depression is similar to an alchemist’s crucible where what you are becomes ground and reduced into the essence of being.

Sometimes people need a dark and shaded place to withdraw to and allow the perfectly legitimate feelings of depression to have free reign. Sometimes the act of resisting this natural element of what we are can entrench it and over time cause it to become pathological.

Depression can be a gift in that it causes one to evaluate the life they’re living–it causes them to go deeper and to begin to ask the fundamental questions of, “who am I and what is my purpose?”

What happens when we resist Saturn?

In our society we spend a lot of time and money entertaining ourselves so to not experience this part of our soul, our humanity, our essence. I think when we suppress anything for too long it begins to express itself in aberrant ways. Denying a part of the soul causes it to ‘act out’ in order to be expressed. We can see this acting out all around us through violence, both verbal and physical.

Religious zealots who’ve mistakenly assumed that one is either good or evil become evil themselves through resistance to the reality that each of us is both Christ and Satan, spirit and ego. Denying a part of oneself is being less than whole and this leads one to fear, and fear can lead us to act in small ways such as to hate or kill what we fear. We see the results of this misunderstanding of how big we really are and the denial of the shadow in the violence sewn by Muslim fanatics such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Christian hate mongers such as the Westboro Baptist Church people. As with the denied, or unconscious aspects of ourselves, rigid dichotomies frequently lead us to all kinds of intolerant and aberrant behaviors.

If God is indeed the unlimited source of all there is, then any limitation becomes a sin– a missing the mark. Fear is a limited perspective also and is seldom a positive emotion to act out of. It may have served us well when we huddled in our caves, but it often gets in the way in the modern age. Defining God too narrowly is also a sin of limited perspective, as is doing hateful things in his name. All of this misses the point of the fundamental unity that a broader perspective generates.

Saturn Devouring one of his Children (1821-23) by– Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes. Currently hanging in the Prado Madrid, Spain.

Posted on April 4, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

The Gift of the Dark Dream

The Dark Dream by.–jbrown67.deviantart.com

Dreams of being a child have come into my sleep along with being wrong and making mistakes, feeling shame and powerlessness and falling. When my waking dream becomes too stressful, when I find that I can’t stay in the here and now because I’m caught up in worries about the future, or guilt from the past, I find my dreams full of powerlessness and fear. Hurricanes, storms, titanic waves, and floods wash through my dreams and add even greater stress to a psyche overburdening itself. If the dreams shared with me on-line are any indication, I’d say this might be true for many of you.

Though I did not measure up to my personal expectations, to the image of myself that I thought I should be, I realized something much greater. The Black Dream where I found myself in the waking world had been giving way to something new.

When facing the darkness one can receive images much grander than their limited images of self. For me I saw that I never gave up, though the way looked impossible; that I always strove to become better than either my own judgments, or the judgments of others. Somehow I found the courage to stand up to the feelings of failure and rejection and to face what I judged to be humiliation with my head held high. I allowed myself to feel the fool and to grow from its presence, to go beyond the fears and become bigger than my estimate of myself.

The experience of recent events and the consciousness they brought in their wake have helped me to realize some of how big I really am. I may not be what I think I should be, an ego-self desire, but once again I’ve discovered that I’m really so much more.

Until I was willing to truly accept the darkness and honor its value, I couldn’t see the ever so small light flickering in the corner. I’ve been fighting the darkness ever so long, but the truth is that rejecting the darkness also rejects the light. This morning, I saw the barest glow and reached for it and it warmed and filled the space that dispelled the darkness before it. Hanging onto the light often seems harder than living in the darkness. But I think it’s a miracle that the light is there at all.

And that’s the gift of the Black Dream, the Shadow, the darkness; it highlights the flicker of light that is our true self. I can also see that to keep it burning I need to share it and it’s in that vein that I do so now. As I’ve said earlier, love is the cure for our nightmares; it’s the light within our darkness.

Posted on April 3, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

The Alchemist’s Crucible

The Alchemist by– David Teniers the younger (1610-1690)

I once used the term “the alchemist’s crucible.” I think this term came to me because at the time I had been reading Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections and was struck with how often he delved into the alchemical arts as a means of understanding the human psyche.

This got me to thinking about the symbolism inherent in alchemy. On the surface the alchemists seemed to be looking for a means of transmuting base metals into precious metals e.g. lead into gold. I think that they were trying, among other things, to make sense of this world of opposites and dichotomies by to find an underlying unity. Why? Well, part of the human condition seems to be that we are all separate from each other and the environment that we find ourselves in. This experience of separation breeds, as I’ve said before, various levels of fear ranging from discomfort to all-out panic. We want to protect ourselves from what is ‘not us’ whether that be on the personal or communal (meaning the tribe, state, nation) level. This of course is the basis for personal and social conflict. Finding a resolution to the conflict that arises from opposition has been key to the history of alchemy, and politics (which is a kind of alchemy itself).

The goal of trying to make sense of what-is by attempting to resolve the basic conflict caused by separation can be seen in all our mythologies where mankind is always trying to deal with its twin natures of the beast and the spirit e.g. note the invention of the Centaur (man’s torso and head on the body of a horse), or the Minotaur (a bull’s head on a man’s body) and the fact that all hero stories have a thematic conflict to resolve. A great deal of modern psychological therapy is to assist the individual with internal psychic conflicts e.g. the conflict between what you are and what you want to be.

I think that among the fundamental goals of all religions, philosophies, and sciences is to bring to consciousness the mysteries of the universe and to observe its fundamental unity.

I also maintain that this unity, this wholeness, already exists, but is generally beneath our awareness. Because of this the universe looks fragmented and dichotomous. This gives dream-work a whole new purpose in that it can bring ones unconscious psyche to consciousness so that we can experience a greater whole and thus a better understanding of what makes us tick. The more we understand of what it means to be human the better our understanding of where we’re standing. For example, to get to know a tree, one needs to stand under it, to ‘listen’ to it. To know another anything (person, place or thing) one needs to stand under it, to be within its context, or to stand in its shoes, and is thus the root meaning of ‘understanding.’

This reminds me of the teachings of G. Gurdjieff, a early 20^th century Russian mystic and spiritual teacher who wrote that humanity lives its life in a “Waking Sleep” and thus only experiences reality subjectively. He suggested that the vast majority of humans live as automatons, but have the power to awaken and become something so much greater.

“Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.”

– Gurdjieff

As automatons we become susceptible to the manipulations of others (advertisers, politicians, radio talk show hosts, religious leaders and zealots, and the hysteria of the masses). The one sided development of our humanity that most of us experience is what passes for ‘life’ in the modern world. I believe that we need to develop all aspects of who we are in order to become a fully integrated (actualized) human being that is fully present to an expanded sense of reality instead of the limited reality we currently embrace. In my experience we mostly just argue our limits without trying to see beyond them.

“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”

– Richard Bach, Illusions

There again is that concept of ‘limiting’ being a root to perverted reality. For many of us we limit our personal development to one of four areas–physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual and for the rare few who might include more than one or even all, they limit the impact through narrow definition.

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

–Richard Bach

What do I mean by expanded definition? This morning in a group discussion one of our group told the story of a young soldier who stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device) while patrolling in Afghanistan. He lost his foot and part of his leg. At first everyone, including the soldier, saw this as only a tragedy, but eventually it brought the family together in ways none of them could have imagined before the event. Everyone connected with the event began to see another more positive outcome, born from the very real tragedy, that would not have happened without it.

I think that the meaning of nearly every event in our lives can be used to expand our reality. Set aside your limited thinking and self-limiting thoughts and be open to reality. Learn to see beneath the meaning of your personal or collective definition to see what else may be there.

“And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

–Shakespeare-Hamlet

This will not be easy.

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In my new book, The Archipelago of Dreams: The Island of the Dream Healer I explore through the genre of a fantasy story what it means to live life in a limited way.

Posted on March 15, 2017March 16, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog · 1 Comment

Nightmares

I had a nightmare the other night, you know one of those where the narrative takes you right up to the most awful part of the horror and then…you wake up. Whew, thank goodness!

Well, not always. Usually I try to get back to sleep so as to resolve the outcome, to finish the story so to speak. In that way I have some control over the outcome, or get more information on the meaning of the dream.

If you were to consider the point where you wake up as the climax of a story then perhaps asking yourself “what happens next?” Or “How might the story end?” might be a good technique for exploring the nightmare further.

Now I don’t mean for someone who is dreaming a reenactment of a literal horror that has happened in their waking life (such as for those who are suffering from PTSD), stay away from those nightmares, they may need more professional guidance*. I’m talking about those that are symbolic of something going on inside you, or that you are reacting to in your daily life, something psychically broader. You might ask yourself, “Does this dream remind me of something in my waking life?”

Nightmares can be a normal dream occurrence after a trauma, but most of the time they present material that you’ve kept hidden (e.g. threats to your self-esteem, loss of something, or someone important, or trouble coping with certain stresses, unconscious memories stimulated by some recent event, or scary emotions that you have avoided) and the unconscious mind, in the service of your health and well-being, is trying to bring them to consciousness so that you can deal with them appropriately. They literally demand attention.

I think that many of us with the standard unfinished nightmare event want to be able to master them, it’s probably why we like such authors as Stephen King, remember Carrie? Finishing the nightmare in a psychically satisfying manner is much better than ignoring it, because if you do …it’ll be baaack!

I’m also not talking “night terrors” here, in those there’s no plot just a lot of scary chaos**. On the other hand, nightmares have a plot, and often a fairly complicated one. You go from balance, or equilibrium, to extreme out of balance then wake up. When you awaken, the climax then dominates the story and this can truncate the meaning and leave you stuck. If you were to treat the nightmare as a narrative, you would then want the story to return to equilibrium i.e. resolution. I’m talking about the process of transformation, the psychic alchemical process of turning something base into something of value.

The kind of intervention to which I’m referring has the advantage of giving you some feedback i.e. if the nightmare has recurred and then after intervention disappears you’ve been successful, if not, try something else.

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*Those suffering from PTSD might use these nightmares as part of a treatment intervention. These nightmares may also be the mind’s way of treating the psychic injury, however, one can get stuck in a constantly recurring nightmare that reintroduces the horror of the event over and over again. This kind of nightmare needs treatment with a professional trained to work with them.

** As an adult and if you get a lot of these night terrors where you are thrashing about in bed you may want to share this with your physician.

Posted on March 9, 2017March 9, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

“I see dead people”

This was a quote from the 1999 movie, The Sixth Sense. In it a little boy confesses to his therapist that he sees and interacts with dead people. The journey that he and the therapist go on becomes a frightening and transformational trip through the spirit world that parallels the world of the living.

An interesting fantasy, but other than those who have claimed to see ghosts, or in stories or movies, or over-dramatized TV ghost hunter shows when, if ever, has this been a reality?

There is an archetypal specter that shadows us throughout our lives and that most of us try to ignore, but one that informs the way we live, behave, and move within our personal universes–DEATH.

Dead people in our dreams have visited many of us e.g. dead relatives and loved ones, dead celebrities, or even ourselves. Ghosts, spirits, and specters fly in and out of our dream spaces, threatening, or offering cryptic advice. Some of us have teetered on the brink of death while others have fallen in. We’ve been shot, stabbed, clubbed, eaten, and died by accident, or disease, or the bite of a snake sometimes over and over again across many nights. We have witnessed mass killings on a field of battle, or in our own homes. What is all this mayhem about?

In part it’s as simple as working through the concept of death itself–an attempt to develop a working relationship with it. These dreams help us to work through our deepest fears for ourselves and for the loss of others.

Sometimes dreaming of those who have died, or fears for our own death can be messages that we have become stuck in our grief, or our fears. At a conscious level we often convince ourselves that we have handled death, or we actively suppress our fears so as to function more efficiently. However, denial, or suppression only works, if it does at all, on a superficial and temporary basis. Healing has not happened because the wound remains hidden and not exposed to the air and a weeping scab is formed under which the wound festers. Learning to face these wounds and fears can be part of a healing process that allows us to move on in our lives.

Dead people in dreams, especially those we know, can be an attempt of the mind to deal with sad feelings, memories, guilt, loss, frustrated love, or anger connected with the person who has died, or to just complete our relationship with them from when they were living.

“To die, to sleep  no more; and by a sleep, to say we end  the heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks  that flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,  to sleep, perchance to dream; Ay, there’s the rub,  for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,  when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,  must give us pause.”–Shakespeare, Hamlet after the ghost of his father has come to him to tell the circumstances of his death.

When these dreams are faced and accepted (vs. denied, or rejected) this eventually allows the dreamer to resolve the loss and move on. There are also people whose images visit us when we are in times of stress and are looking for guidance or consolation. My Dad often shows up when an old feeling, or special memory associated with him is longed for, especially one that can lead to my own health and well being. Some people have shared with me that when facing an intractable problem and wishing the wisdom of a deceased parent were available, that that parent in their dreams will often visit them.

If you as the dreamer were to kill someone in the dream, it’s most often a symbol for the desire to “kill off” what they represent, e.g. a feeling, a relationship, their effect upon you or others, or even a circumstance or situation which their character may represent.

The death of feelings (such as when there is a loss of love for something or someone), or motivation, or the end of a plan, relationship, a belief, a chapter of ones life, or a transition about to happen e.g. mothers sometime see the death of a boy child in their dreams as the son transitions in waking life from one state of being to another– into preschool, or kindergarten, his first overnight, high school graduation, and off to college. In fact, whenever one is in transition from one state of being, or one event to another, dead people and death can show up in a dream. And when it does, ask yourself, “what is dying in my life–what is coming to an end, or what has the potential for ending soon?” This will give you clues as to the meaning of the dream.

Posted on February 27, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

Are we only half ourselves?

It is said that from blackness comes the light. As Massimilla Harris, a Jungian therapist reminds us, “keep in mind that birth comes out of darkness.” Many of us have some kind of hurt, some part of us that has sustained psychological, emotional, and spiritual injury that we have relegated to the darkness of our subconscious mind.

We all need healing to one degree or another and it is the guidance of the essentially positive Great Mother, the innate and archetypal feminine, who comes to us in our dreams and our darkest hours who can lead us into the light and healing. It is in our nature to seek change and if we let her, Psyche will show us the way.

Within us are a number of wounded negative complexes that serve as obstacles to our ultimate happiness. Our dreams offer us access to these wounds so that they can be treated. Love is at the core of our very nature but most of us I fear don’t really know what love really is. The on again/off again love from our childhoods has left many unsure, insecure untrusting, in scarcity, and anxious regarding the true nature of this love.

This leads many to cripple or ignore the inner feminine aspects of self-compassion and self-nurturance and make it difficult to forgive or even love ourselves let alone to forgive and truly love others.

Our environment doesn’t really support the value of the feminine either in that at least as far as the male gender is concerned compassion, nurturance, and intuition are signs of weakness. Women are demeaned when they show these attributes in the work place and further demeaned if they show masculine traits such assertiveness or decisiveness.

In my way of thinking this denial of the feminine aspect of the human psyche has caused a cultural neurosis– a feeling of incompleteness and unfulfillment by many. This may or may not be an obstacle to personal achievement but even amongst those who have achieved much there is quite often a hole in their lives that goes deeply and negatively affects their sense of happiness and well being.

Whether our culture is ruled by the matriarchal or the patriarchal i.e. whether we are relational or success and identity oriented to do so without compassion, and nurturance can cause all sorts of psychic damage to individuals and societies e.g. the guilt and/or shame of not living up to expectations of self or others that can result in the dubious safety of conformity which stifles creativity and joy or the loss of what our relationship values really are.

We are as a society out of touch with the feminine aspect, the other half of us that brings balance to our being.

Next time the feminine shows up in your dream pay attention to her and the message she brings, she may be your ticket toward greater love and happiness.

Posted on February 22, 2017February 22, 2017 by The Book of Dreams blog

The netherworld

Down in the cave of the human mind where reality stops being reality lays the world of the dream. It is here that the mind’s inner eye perceives a fantasy much richer in form and function than the theater of the waking world.

In order to enter this world one needs to suffer a kind of death, for here is a place where the body cannot go.

Unless you live in total darkness there’s always a shadow, a hidden reflection of yourself–it is by definition that place where light cannot reach because of some obstruction. And that obstruction is often your ego-self.

The ego is that part of us that forms the conscious world identity that we hide behind and the inner image of ourselves that we are both proud of and afraid of simultaneously.

It is the guardian at the gate of our consciousness. It is the judge and jury for what gets sent to the shadow lands of our unconscious mind. And like our waking world prisons our shadow lands are overcrowded with what we reject and fear to face.

This is the netherworld of the shaman, medium, and mystic. But is also the hidden world of you and I. Whether mystic or common man we are called by our dreams to explore an underworld that rules the world above. Given that most of our mind is hidden from consciousness we often act, feel, and behave out of some mysterious force. When compounded by all the individuals of a society that force can become overwhelming for good or bad and lead us to our destiny or destruction.

When we don’t acknowledge the real forces behind our actions or our pathology we often make up things to explain these behaviors. For example, we will point at our parents, our upbringing, our genetics and our experiences with each other as cause for our beliefs, ideas and behaviors. But more often than not it is our un-dealt with shadow that is the true source of much of what we do, or don’t do, and it’s often the motivating force behind our actions.

Some say that to live more authentically, to be truly free, and to be more alive, one needs to deal with their hidden aspects, their shadow nature.

Mind-Virus-Wetiko-Collective-Shadow-of-Humanity-Carl-Jung-Shadow.jpg