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We are stuck in an illusion: What’s the Point?*

In a recent nightmare everything is vanishing. I struggle to hold onto something, but the holding only increases the vanishing. 

Why is the society that seemed to support the goodness in ourselves seem to be vanishing? How is it our society is becoming more and more self-centered?

At the core of the problem seems to be fear but not the fear that protects the body but the fear that protects the ego, that which makes us separate from everything else. The beliefs of the Ego-Self are what we use to protect us from this fear and whether they are fact or fiction based they separate us from our fears as well as from each other and the environment around us.

Beliefs are necessary to maintain the illusion of separateness. Without them the separateness dissolves and we become all things. The defense of our beliefs is the defense of our ego, our illusion of separateness. Without them the illusion disappears and we disappear as a thing, an entity separate from all other entities. We will defend our beliefs to the death of all those who threaten them as well as our own death for without our beliefs, what are we but the everything, the whole, the All? And as All we cease to exist as does everything else.

Letting go of our illusions is a form of Kenosis, an act of “self-emptying”. I’m reminded of the story of Jacob’s Ladder in the Christian Bible where a ladder ascends from the earth-bound illusion to the heavens i.e. from the mundane of things to the everything/nothing of the divine.

My ego is terrified for it translates as oblivion as in becoming nothing i.e., no thing. What’s the point? 

It seems that our beliefs not only make us something but also give us a point for being.

This is not to say that one must be stuck in a belief for in a reality of infinite beliefs there’s a lot to experience and just maybe that’s the point.

*This article can also be found in The Book of Dreams blog

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Dark trees and shining moon

Plate 131 In Jung’s Red Book

In Jung’s Redbook on page 131 there’s a dark tree superimposed on a moonlike image that represents the joining of opposites, in this case the earth and the celestial realms, but also brings forth the feminine* and the unconscious aspects of the moon.

It also represents the flashes of insight that illuminate the hidden aspects of ourselves. The tree can represent the Self.

I see these trees everywhere against the full and partial moon as I take my nighttime walks that I use as a time of peacefulness, centeredness, and contemplation. I’m reminded of my own psychic journey as every one of these images synchronistically ** come into view. On this psychic journey, which Jung suggests that we are all on, I search my inner self for that which may bring psychological wholeness by looking for those sparks from the shadows of the unconscious.

An example of one of my shadow tree images

*Please note that I am not referring to biological gender when I use terms such as feminine or masculine. They are aspects that appear to represent generally ways of viewing reality, e.g., Compassion, inclusiveness, relatedness, intuitiveness, receptivity, nurturance, and linked to the unconscious as feminine aspects with assertiveness, action orientation, the conscious, and autonomy linked to the masculine. Each of us have both aspects with some groupings being more dominant than others.

** Acausal events that are seemingly coincidental (unlinked) that may mirror internal thoughts or feelings e.g., thinking of someone who then calls for the first time in a long time.

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“It’s not about you, Dad!”

After some time, when first hearing this from my daughter (see July 27th posting), it’s come to me that as an individuated soul, she’s right; it’s not about me; it’s about the soul. What I identify as me is just the vehicle. The ego-self (me) adds personalization where there may be none. Most of my upsets aren’t really about me, either. They belong to others trying to navigate their own lives. It’s about their ego interpretations and the daily events that they experience. 

This reflexive need to occasionally interpret the actions of others as being about me can get a bit old, and sometimes, it can get in the way of compassionately responding to others’ experiences and how they are dealing with them.

All too often, I create my waking dream experience in a nightmarish way when there’s little that relates to me directly. Unresolved experiences of earlier similar events in my life still get triggered as though they are current and have little to do with what’s going on with the other person I am relating to at the moment.

As with a sleeping dream, when I can step back to gain another perspective on the events in my waking dream, I can better interpret their meaning and deal with them more appropriately.

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“Throw a line into the darkness”

The Nightmare by-Henry Fuseli

The other day while watching a rather intriguing detective series on PBS titled Anika I became aware of the background music and its rather haunting lyrics. The theme song “Bringing Murder to the Land” by Newcome and Allison spoke to me in another way than perhaps it was intended as a theme song for a murder drama.

“Throw a line into the darkness

Oh, we are shadows, blaze inside

This light will shine unbroken tonight

Shine inside

And this light, it can blind us

Torch the shadows for all time

And you can color in my dark nights

Paint your promise over me

This light will shine unbroken tonight

Shine inside

Shine tonight

Shine tonight

Shine tonight

Burn

Burn

Burn

Burn

Burn”

The first line, “Throw a line into the darkness,” reminds me of what the mind is doing through a nightmare. It’s also reminiscent of “fishing,” a metaphor for bringing up something from the spiritual and the deep so that one can deal with it in the light. While trying to bring this darkness into the light of consciousness, “Oh, we are shadows, blaze inside. This light will shine unbroken tonight; shine inside. And this light, it can blind us, torch the shadows for all time” these lines suggest to me that we can be overwhelmed and blinded by the darkness of our shadow self as it grows in brightness, entering our awareness. Bringing the dark into the light can add color to our darker natures, and by looking more closely at the nightmare, it can hold much promise for bringing light into our future nights and “burn” away our fears.

Perhaps it was the mysterious and haunting way the music was sung and the slight reverb in its presentation that wormed its way into my soul, or maybe it was the cryptic lyrics. Still, it struck me as the perfect theme for the nightmare dreaming and interpreting genre.

Murder in a dream can conjure the need for change or the effects change can have on one’s status quo. It can also be about ending some vexing issues, habits, or behavior.

Bright lights can symbolize spiritual awakening from the darkness of the ego coming through the hidden aspects of the unconscious, which can be quite shocking at first when one sees a different reality than the one they have been living.

The ‘’burn, burn, burn…” in a dream can be about something that you can’t just ignore. This may be true of any occasional nightmare. If one is human, There is repressed material in the unconscious mind that can affect everything done in the conscious world. Nightmares bring light to that hidden material, especially when it causes problems that must be addressed.

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Death in dreams: not so ominous as you might think

Philosophy and religion on the surface look like opposites where on one side one operates on faith and belief while the other critiques and challenges belief. One espouses the rational while the other embraces the irrational.

However, both are of one mind regarding death in that both welcome the mysteries of death because it speaks to the mysteries of life.

When life and death are seen as opposites separated at birth death becomes real. But when death is seen as the continued transition of the soul’s migration through reality the separation and opposition disappear into a mystical unity.

In Jungian philosophy a goal of life is the reunion of opposites called the coniunctio.

In this vision of life’s purpose death takes on a new meaning shifting from an ending to an element in the soul’s journey toward unity and becomes about change and transition from one way of being to another. This point of view is also reflected in one’s dreams where death can be a symbol for change, an end from one way of being to another. Thus, the image of death becomes an archetype for transition. To embrace it is to partially fulfill the purpose of life i.e., to bring all of life’s opposites (life/death, male/female, the conscious/unconscious) into unity.

After doing a little research on the meaning of death psychologically I put down my laptop and ambled down the hall to bed. During the night I had a dream where I sat before a desk with others standing around me and I placed a small beaker upon the desk and concentrated my focus upon it. When I did it correctly a transition from one place of being would become a new one i.e., we would all sort of “portal jump” from one place to another. I was elated with each successful transition.

Upon awakening the dream seemed significant though a mystery as to how. As I continued my research later that morning the dream’s meaning began to clear. The portal jump from one reality to another was an archetype of death. It’s a focus that I find I often think about these days as life gets closer and closer to this transition period. A shift in focus from an ‘ending’ of life, or place of being, to one of a ‘change’ of place of being seems important to me and gives me a new sense of purpose. As with my earlier life my purpose was to prepare myself through all of life’s transitions to live my life as fully as possible, I now can create another purpose that of preparing myself for this next transition. As a soul it’s all my life.

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Insight from a disturbing dream

A scene from the movie, Matrix, we are all a digitally coded reality.

The night before’s dream centered around a vision of a “heart,” more an experience than a physical image. It is a life-altering experience that appears to have a physical form but is not material in essence. The heart experience seems real, but it is not; it appears present, but it is not. I can get it for someone but can’t guarantee that it will work for them. There’s a sense that it brings profound connection and dispels the feeling of separation. I reach into the ether to pull one into existence.

My interpretation of this dream appears to be as cryptic as the dream but reflects something I’ve been psycho-emotionally wrestling with for quite some time. As time has moved on, I’ve developed more and more clarity regarding the thoughts and feelings that have plagued me.

Are we but avatars of One being? Not actual, not separate, with the experience of separateness being illusory born of a system designed to create the illusion built over time.

I wonder if stories of Jesus being sent to earth so that God can experience the human condition are but a human projection or metaphor that reveals a much deeper reality of life?

The creation stories of many cultures also seem to suggest that the “we” we see ourselves as is, but an illusion created by the One.

The reality of death may be part of that illusion because if we are only avatars or expressions, then we were never really born. We are not separate because we were never apart. We are only the illusion of individual beings. As avatars, we may be “experiencers,” aka the “heart of God” or the One. We are both black and white, illumined and dark, gold and lead, wise and foolish, believers or non-believers, loving and hateful, holograms of the One’s expression into the world.

With this view that everything, including what we call “we,” are but God expressions, I seem to have moved from a monotheistic view of God to a pantheistic one. In this view, God, whatever it is, acts as a prism diffracting itself into a myriad of colors (The “we” I’m referring to) but, in essence, is only the One all-encompassing color. The “heart” of my dream is the One we call God.

Shades of the movie Matrix!

Once seen, it changes my relationship with everything I’ve been calling and believing to be “other.”

The strange thing for me is that if this were a true reflection of reality, what would I do with it? In other words, so what? I don’t have an answer for that, yet I somehow feel more at ease with these thoughts than with the belief in separateness. Separateness brings with it fear, helplessness, and vulnerability.

This point of view also seems to answer in part my age-old question of what is my purpose? My purpose in this scenario is just to be, do what I do, experience what I experience, strive for what I strive, feel what I feel, change when I think I need to, and think what I think whenever I think it. That may seem too easy to some, but for me, it’s always been a struggle and probably, to some extent, will remain the same. So, to my list, I’ll add “struggle” with what I struggle with.

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Awakening from a dream we all share

A young man begins to awaken from a dream and finds himself at the door of a strangers house. He knocks and is confronted with the strangest dream of all and up until then what had been an ordinary life became very unordinary indeed.

Originally titled The Twelve Laws of Magic follows an unwitting student through his alchemical transformation into a world most people have never thought existed. It changes him but how and how it will change the reader is for you to find out.

For more on this story check out the following link: www.psychesdream.com

Or if really anxious to get started, go to Amazon and begin one of the most magical journeys you’ve ever been on.

Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

A nightmare dream mirroring my fears and despair

A dream was given to me after reading about how the military chiefs of the US planned to stop a coup planned by our ex-president. A dream that grew out of the black muck of a new Nazi party that had taken hold of half the nation, half its senators, and most of its governors and legislators. It is a Reichstag moment where anti-democracy forces burned the seat of the German government and took over the country. I used to believe that it couldn’t happen here, and yet here we are.

I want to believe that every dream comes to us in the service of our health and well-being. Still, this one seems to be both a clarion call to fight the evil growing in the heartland, to fix that which is broken but also as a harbinger of death to a nation and a way of life, a pandemic of false fears promulgated by the righteous right hand as it deals a death blow to the left leaving the country handicapped and less than the whole.

The dream visited as I chewed on this most disturbing news.

The dream:

“I’m in a pool, and the tiles on the bottom are all broken up and scattered. The very foundation of the pool has been destroyed.” This is a dream of shadow and soul work as is I believe the waking world projection in the political world.

Our world, our country, our democratic principles, and a great experiment in democracy are stressed and in some places breaking up, and its foundational tiles of the free press, separation of powers, freedom of speech, and right to vote are all being shattered and cast aside. Soon the great pool of wonder that is, or was, the United States that was once as Abraham Lincoln once said, the world’s “last best hope” will begin to leak and will soon be empty of the waters of hope, the waters of life, the baptismal font of freedom, and that symbol which represents the Holy Spirit to Christians everywhere will be no more. 

We are doing this to ourselves out of fear, lies, political greed, and our self-righteous need to kill figuratively and practically what we see as different from ourselves, a caveman skill that we have yet to grow out of.

I’m not sure we can stop it, and like environmental warming, the degradation may be too vast and all-encompassing that there’s no turning it back at least not in the short term. However, we must put up the good fight for our self-respect, but I’m no longer sure we can win. Different from the last great war for freedom, there will be no United States to come to our rescue, for as Pogo once said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” All we have is ourselves, those of compassion, love, truth, goodwill, and reason regardless of political or religious point of view to call upon to save us. Let us hope and pray that it’s enough.

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A Chi Rho Synchronicity

A mosaic of Constantine’s Shield 

At lunch one day I ordered my meal, then started to read from a book that I’d brought with me about a dream that the Emperor Constantine had in the early 4th century just before he went into an important battle. Early in the day he had witnessed in the clouds of the sky the letters X and P, or the Greek letters Chi and Rho that stood for the Christ, or Kristos. That night he dreamed again of the letters and knew that God was with him. So he placed Chi and Rho upon his helmet and ordered his legions to place it on their shields and then he went into battle. He won that battle and many more after that. It was then, so it is said, that he embraced Christianity for all of the empire. Before the dream he was the persecutor of all Christians and after he became their friend and benefactor.

I thought this an interesting story regarding the conversion experience of a Roman Emperor, but was also aware that his conversion was only the beginning of his process toward a greater understanding. As a psychologist I viewed it, if the story were true, as his process of Individuation e.g. his development toward wholeness, nothing more or less than that. The letters in his dream and in his vision were symbolic of a developing awareness perhaps orchestrated by his unconscious mind. Humans are always looking for meaning and because Constantine was looking for a divine sign regarding the impending battle, an ordeal without an assured positive outcome, his unconscious psyche may have served him up one.

I closed the book and finished my meal, paid, said goodbye to my favorite waitress, and walked out into a cloudy day toward the car. Halfway across the parking lot my attention was drawn to a piece of plastic half buried in the dirty silt of a drying puddle. What prompted my next move I do not know but I bent down and picked it up, scraped off the muck, and took a closer look. There on what appeared to be an ordinary plastic cap were emblazoned the letters X and P.

Stunned by the synchronicity I looked about as though to see if something else might happen, or to see if anyone noticed what I was doing for now I was tearing up and felt a little embarrassed by it. Seeing no one around I carefully put the cap into my pocket and climbed into the car.

That night I had a nightmarish dream where I was taken to the top of an impossibly tall building where I was forced to eat a half dead pigeon and a nearly dead rat. I felt helpless and coerced and felt sorry for the animals and not wanting to cause them any pain. What I wanted to do was to just get through the ordeal. I’m also struck by the image of me “eating crow” (even though it’s a pigeon), i.e. to experience humiliation by admitting my wrongness and arrogance about something e.g. that Constantine’s dream was merely a psychological process vs. a divine message?

This dream may have also reflected my recent experience with an activity that I found to be quite difficult, physically and emotionally, and there too I just wanted to get through it. I felt coerced, not by another, but by my own inner drives for recognition and the fatigue and emotional drain were consuming me. The experience that I forced myself to endure was perhaps unhealthy and damaging to the soul. Perhaps I needed to pay greater attention to the needs of the soul and less to the instincts of the animal within. Perhaps I needed to be more compassionate with myself.

There was also the sense that even as I had attained the heights my ego was being brought back down through the act of something very basal.

Compassion and balance seemed to be competing messages in this dream and as I looked closer I wondered if that was not so for Constantine as well. He too was behaving in a manner unhealthy to his soul through the brutal persecution of a people. He too was looking for a sign that would help him through an ordeal, to help him see that there is something bigger than he and his way of viewing the world.

I am of course not sure that the synchronistic event of finding the cap with the very same letters that showed up in a story whose veracity I earlier scoffed at, had anything but coincidental meaning, but it did make me stop and think about what I was doing in my own life. It also pointed to how I had made ego-importance superior to that of my soul. 

Finally, it has made me pause to wonder yet again if the reality that I believe to be true is indeed true. Perhaps I’m not as much in control of what happens around and within me as I would like to believe. If synchronicities are not just meaningless coincidences, then what is it that creates these seemingly connected and yet acausal realities?

I also wonder if these synchronicities are not there to aid us in opening our minds to a broader reality than the one we’re conditioned to or the one our ego creates so as to be the star of the show?

Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

Is reality just a soap opera we’ve made up?

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What we see of reality is often just a conditioned response and not reality.

 

Today I posted an article on the Book of Dreams Blog on Becoming Real and wanted to expand on that idea. The thought then struck me that in the Dark Knight blog I often speak to the hidden parts of ourselves and the how and why that material gets hidden in the first place. This blog posting is then an answer to those thoughts.

Most of my writings have been about reality and my relationship to it. When younger I thought that reality was pretty much created by something outside my self and that I was pretty much at the effect of it versus being at cause with it and God forbid I should be responsible for any of it.

The truth was my reality was conditioned by those around me i.e. I pretty much went for acknowledgment of any kind, negative or positive. Why? Because in a state of being separate from others, an individual entity, my only chance of feeling connected i.e. related was to seek and get acknowledgment, or approval. I would therefor do those things that achieved the goal. What I learned to do was to behave in those ways that insured approval i.e. I became something other than myself. This is called behavioral conditioning.

This is where we all begin to develop a mask because often being who we are beneath the mask is often not enough to secure the needed approval. So we fashion a mask that seems to be what people want us to be in order to give us the acknowledgment that we so crave. Note that the people we are seeking acknowledgment from are doing the same thing. So neither of us is being real, we’re all being what we think the other mask wants us to be with each desperately wanting to feel connected. But connection can only happen between real people, not their masks, so there’s no real satisfaction in the relationship.

The problem with this kind of relationship is that we never really get the approval we seek because what we get is for the fake us, not the real us. Most of us then decide that there must be something wrong with us because being ourselves isn’t enough. And the bottom line to this farce is that one cannot truly experience a joyful, happy relationship with anything or anyone because even if we’re loved it is only the mask, the “not me” that is loved. And out of that reality is created, the threat of being found out.

So here we are trying to avoid the pain of being separated by creating an avatar of ourselves so as to feel connected but by definition this isn’t the real us so we still aren’t in relationship, we still don’t feel connected and still don’t feel acknowledged. Can you see how this can become neurotic? We cannot win in this state, nor can anyone else. The masks we wear actually sustain the disconnect we’re hoping to overcome.

But what would happen if we were to support each other in being ourselves, with all the blemishes, habits, doubts and fears that make up a human being? What would happen if we could be like our much younger selves before we learned how not to be ourselves?

What would happen if we stopped enabling each other’s masks? What if we stopped using each other to support our soap operas?