DRAGONTREE 9
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2012 - YEAR OF THE DRAGON
Taoist Alchemy
Body, Soul & Spirits
STREGGOI, by Nicholas de Vere
Holographic Memory
Dragon Descent & Ancestral Memories
Soul Keys: Deep memory Work
Dragon Dreamhealing
The Heart of Dreams
Body, Soul & Spirits
STREGGOI, by Nicholas de Vere
Holographic Memory
Dragon Descent & Ancestral Memories
Soul Keys: Deep memory Work
Dragon Dreamhealing
The Heart of Dreams
Taoist Alchemy
Taoist Alchemy
by Charles Johnson
Over 10,000 years ago the Taoists began developing external alchemy. External alchemy was comprised of the Immortal Pill, potions of mercury (still used today) crystal essences, flowers, herbs and many other techniques designed to enhance longevity and vitality. Over the next several thousand years the wisest of these masters discovered that these methods were limited. They learned that there where methods that could be implemented were the body's energies, the earth and the cosmos could be combined and transformed for the purpose of immortality and happiness far more effectively then with external methods. Our society today is high paced and high stressed. This high stressed environment depletes life force energy (chi) consequentially bringing upon us the depleting effects of aging. These effects span from lack of vitality, sexual energy, dementia, hearing loss, memory loss, just to name a few. Social emotional issues also arise along with the cognizant and physical effects of aging. Gerontologists, still lacking sufficient knowledge as to the cause of aging and death, tell us that we can prevent many of the effects of aging with exercise and proper diet. However, their suggestions are by far the most preventative! The science of Taoism (Nei Dan Gong, lit. "Inner Elixir Skill), the original Gerontogy, is the truest study of longevity and vitality known today. A science of regulating time, the formulas implemented by a Taoist scientist bring youthfulness to the aging process. There is NO reason why we can not age for many years and not continue to experience levels of energy and vitality of teenagers and young adults. With this science we have the ability to endure a high stress environment and maintain high levels of strength, endurance and vitality. There are some Taoist basics that you can use for profound effects in your life.
by Charles Johnson
Over 10,000 years ago the Taoists began developing external alchemy. External alchemy was comprised of the Immortal Pill, potions of mercury (still used today) crystal essences, flowers, herbs and many other techniques designed to enhance longevity and vitality. Over the next several thousand years the wisest of these masters discovered that these methods were limited. They learned that there where methods that could be implemented were the body's energies, the earth and the cosmos could be combined and transformed for the purpose of immortality and happiness far more effectively then with external methods. Our society today is high paced and high stressed. This high stressed environment depletes life force energy (chi) consequentially bringing upon us the depleting effects of aging. These effects span from lack of vitality, sexual energy, dementia, hearing loss, memory loss, just to name a few. Social emotional issues also arise along with the cognizant and physical effects of aging. Gerontologists, still lacking sufficient knowledge as to the cause of aging and death, tell us that we can prevent many of the effects of aging with exercise and proper diet. However, their suggestions are by far the most preventative! The science of Taoism (Nei Dan Gong, lit. "Inner Elixir Skill), the original Gerontogy, is the truest study of longevity and vitality known today. A science of regulating time, the formulas implemented by a Taoist scientist bring youthfulness to the aging process. There is NO reason why we can not age for many years and not continue to experience levels of energy and vitality of teenagers and young adults. With this science we have the ability to endure a high stress environment and maintain high levels of strength, endurance and vitality. There are some Taoist basics that you can use for profound effects in your life.
The Inner Smile Technique
by Charles Johnson
The foundational exercise of ALL Taoist practice is the Inner Smile; loving the internal organs and glands.
This one of the most simple yet profound exercise that one will encounter with Taoist practice. The exercise promotes the healthy function of the internal organs and glands, consequentially promoting positive virtues and enhanced joy and happiness. Not to forget... more energy and vitality!
The Taoist realized thousands of years ago that within each of our internal organs are manifest various hormonal chemicals that effect all our body. When we experience various emotions, these emotion have effects that our internal organs deal with from the hormonal chemicals produced. Negative emotions, over time, will create dis-ease. Through the simple exercise of internal smiling we can transform ANY emotion into a more positive experience. This is just ONE effect of internal smiling however and is the foundation to creating a more healthy dis-ease free life.
Because of limited space I will give just the basics now:
When the heart is overheated,
hate, cruelty, and impatience
come out.
When the liver is out
of balance, anger is
expressed easily.
When the lungs are weak,
the emotions of sadness
and depression manifest.
When the stomach
and spleen are weak
or imbalanced, worry
is expressed.
When the kidney's
energy is low, fear comes. (Mantak Chia 1993)
By smiling to these organs the emotions are transformed, by truly loving ourselves from the inside out... we change our lives. In the beginning the inner smile will take about 20 minutes to perform and feel, however in time one will be able to manifest the benefits of this exercises in a few short minutes, ANY time.
Smiling to the Organs
1. Sit comfortably on the edge of your chair with your feet flat on
the floor. Keep your back straight. Stay relaxed.
2. Close your eyes and become aware of the soles of your feet. (Bubbling Springs point)
Feel the connection to the energy of the earth
3. Become aware of yourself sitting on the chair and the energy surrounding you.. Imagine smiling energy around you This can be an image of your own smiling face, or anything that makes you feel love.
4. Be aware of the midpoint between your eyebrows. Let your forehead relax, and allow the Third Eye to open. Place the palm of your hands on your eyes. Breath in this smiling energy and feel your eyes smiling.
5. Allow the smiling energy to flow down to your facial muscles, down through your neck.
6. Thymus Gland: With your hands now on your thymus gland area,
Let the smiling energy flow down to your thymus gland, which is located behind the upper part of
your sternum. Feel the thymus gland become warm as it begins to vibrate and expand.
7. Heart: Place your hands on your heart. Let the warm, smiling energy spread from the thymus gland
down to the heart. The heart will generate the virtues of joy and happiness.
Spend as much time as you need to feel the heart relax and expand with loving energy.
8. Lungs: Now with your hands on both sides of the chest, let the joy and happiness
from the heart expand outward to your lungs. Feel the lungs open as the happy, smiling energy flows
into them. You should feel your entire chest cavity filling with smiling, loving energy.
The lungs are associated courage and righteousness.
9. Liver: Bring your hands now to the rightside of the body. Let the smiling, loving energy
continue to build up in the heart and flow out to the lungs and from the lungs to the liver. Feel the liver become immersed in smiling, loving, joyous energy. When you smile to the liver, you will dissolve anger allowing kindness energy to grow. The Chinese suggest this also helps strengthen your decision- making power.
10. Pancreas: Bring the hands and energy over to the left side now.
As you smile into the pancreas, see that it is healthy and functioning smoothly. Here you will feel open.
11. Spleen: Maintaining your hands position become aware of the spleen. Continuing around
to the left smile into the spleen. As smiling, loving energy builds up in the spleen, let it flow into the kidneys
as the virtue of fairness grows form the spleen.
12. Kidneys: Bring your palms now to the kidneys. Smile down to the kidneys and feel them
begin to expand with radiant energy. The kidneys are associated with the emotion of fear.
As you smile into them, fear melts away, and the virtue of gentleness grows.
13. Next, send the smiling energy down into the urinary bladder,
urethra, genitals, and perineum.
Women: The collection point for female sexual energy is known as the Ovarian Palace, located about three inches below the navel, midway between the ovaries. Allow this Energy to smile into the ovaries, uterus, and vagina. Bring the combined sexual, smiling, and virtue energies up to the navel, and visualize the energies spiraling into that point.
Men: The collection point for male sexual energy is know as the Sperm Palace, located
one-and-a-half inches above the base of the penis in the area of the prostate gland and seminal vesicles. Smile, and visualize smiling energies down into the prostate gland and testicles. Bring the combined sexual, smiling, and
virtue energies up to the navel, and spiral them into that point .
14. Rest and Gather the Chi at the Navel. Placing right hand on top of the left, with the palms facing the naval, place the left palm on the naval point. Imagine all the smiling warm energy spiraling from left to right around the naval point. With your palms start with large circles, condensing the energy and circles smaller and smaller around the naval several times. Hold the palms still above the naval and imagine all this energy collected to be stored as a power house reserve of energy at you naval.
15. End this meditation by seeing/imagining a great root grow from the base of your spine deep down into the earth. Feel the root deep and spreading in many branches in all directions. Pull energy from the earth into your naval. Now see a trunk grow from your crown high into the cosmos to the very center of the galaxy. Bring this cosmic energy down into the naval. Rotate the earth and cosmic energies several times.
Breath Deep, Be Relaxed, Discover Peace!
by Charles Johnson
The foundational exercise of ALL Taoist practice is the Inner Smile; loving the internal organs and glands.
This one of the most simple yet profound exercise that one will encounter with Taoist practice. The exercise promotes the healthy function of the internal organs and glands, consequentially promoting positive virtues and enhanced joy and happiness. Not to forget... more energy and vitality!
The Taoist realized thousands of years ago that within each of our internal organs are manifest various hormonal chemicals that effect all our body. When we experience various emotions, these emotion have effects that our internal organs deal with from the hormonal chemicals produced. Negative emotions, over time, will create dis-ease. Through the simple exercise of internal smiling we can transform ANY emotion into a more positive experience. This is just ONE effect of internal smiling however and is the foundation to creating a more healthy dis-ease free life.
Because of limited space I will give just the basics now:
When the heart is overheated,
hate, cruelty, and impatience
come out.
When the liver is out
of balance, anger is
expressed easily.
When the lungs are weak,
the emotions of sadness
and depression manifest.
When the stomach
and spleen are weak
or imbalanced, worry
is expressed.
When the kidney's
energy is low, fear comes. (Mantak Chia 1993)
By smiling to these organs the emotions are transformed, by truly loving ourselves from the inside out... we change our lives. In the beginning the inner smile will take about 20 minutes to perform and feel, however in time one will be able to manifest the benefits of this exercises in a few short minutes, ANY time.
Smiling to the Organs
1. Sit comfortably on the edge of your chair with your feet flat on
the floor. Keep your back straight. Stay relaxed.
2. Close your eyes and become aware of the soles of your feet. (Bubbling Springs point)
Feel the connection to the energy of the earth
3. Become aware of yourself sitting on the chair and the energy surrounding you.. Imagine smiling energy around you This can be an image of your own smiling face, or anything that makes you feel love.
4. Be aware of the midpoint between your eyebrows. Let your forehead relax, and allow the Third Eye to open. Place the palm of your hands on your eyes. Breath in this smiling energy and feel your eyes smiling.
5. Allow the smiling energy to flow down to your facial muscles, down through your neck.
6. Thymus Gland: With your hands now on your thymus gland area,
Let the smiling energy flow down to your thymus gland, which is located behind the upper part of
your sternum. Feel the thymus gland become warm as it begins to vibrate and expand.
7. Heart: Place your hands on your heart. Let the warm, smiling energy spread from the thymus gland
down to the heart. The heart will generate the virtues of joy and happiness.
Spend as much time as you need to feel the heart relax and expand with loving energy.
8. Lungs: Now with your hands on both sides of the chest, let the joy and happiness
from the heart expand outward to your lungs. Feel the lungs open as the happy, smiling energy flows
into them. You should feel your entire chest cavity filling with smiling, loving energy.
The lungs are associated courage and righteousness.
9. Liver: Bring your hands now to the rightside of the body. Let the smiling, loving energy
continue to build up in the heart and flow out to the lungs and from the lungs to the liver. Feel the liver become immersed in smiling, loving, joyous energy. When you smile to the liver, you will dissolve anger allowing kindness energy to grow. The Chinese suggest this also helps strengthen your decision- making power.
10. Pancreas: Bring the hands and energy over to the left side now.
As you smile into the pancreas, see that it is healthy and functioning smoothly. Here you will feel open.
11. Spleen: Maintaining your hands position become aware of the spleen. Continuing around
to the left smile into the spleen. As smiling, loving energy builds up in the spleen, let it flow into the kidneys
as the virtue of fairness grows form the spleen.
12. Kidneys: Bring your palms now to the kidneys. Smile down to the kidneys and feel them
begin to expand with radiant energy. The kidneys are associated with the emotion of fear.
As you smile into them, fear melts away, and the virtue of gentleness grows.
13. Next, send the smiling energy down into the urinary bladder,
urethra, genitals, and perineum.
Women: The collection point for female sexual energy is known as the Ovarian Palace, located about three inches below the navel, midway between the ovaries. Allow this Energy to smile into the ovaries, uterus, and vagina. Bring the combined sexual, smiling, and virtue energies up to the navel, and visualize the energies spiraling into that point.
Men: The collection point for male sexual energy is know as the Sperm Palace, located
one-and-a-half inches above the base of the penis in the area of the prostate gland and seminal vesicles. Smile, and visualize smiling energies down into the prostate gland and testicles. Bring the combined sexual, smiling, and
virtue energies up to the navel, and spiral them into that point .
14. Rest and Gather the Chi at the Navel. Placing right hand on top of the left, with the palms facing the naval, place the left palm on the naval point. Imagine all the smiling warm energy spiraling from left to right around the naval point. With your palms start with large circles, condensing the energy and circles smaller and smaller around the naval several times. Hold the palms still above the naval and imagine all this energy collected to be stored as a power house reserve of energy at you naval.
15. End this meditation by seeing/imagining a great root grow from the base of your spine deep down into the earth. Feel the root deep and spreading in many branches in all directions. Pull energy from the earth into your naval. Now see a trunk grow from your crown high into the cosmos to the very center of the galaxy. Bring this cosmic energy down into the naval. Rotate the earth and cosmic energies several times.
Breath Deep, Be Relaxed, Discover Peace!
GENETIC MEMORY
- Frank Herbert on working with Ancestral Memories -
What is the most profound difference between us, between you and me? You already know it.
It’s these ancestral memories. Mine come at me in the full glare of awareness.
Yours' work from your blind side. Some call it instinct or fate.
The memories apply their leverages to each of us – on what we think and what we do.
You think you are immune to such influences? I am Galileo. I stand here and tell you: “Yet it moves.”
That which moves can exert its force in ways no mortal power ever before dated stem. I am here to dare this.
What is the most profound difference between us, between you and me? You already know it.
It’s these ancestral memories. Mine come at me in the full glare of awareness.
Yours' work from your blind side. Some call it instinct or fate.
The memories apply their leverages to each of us – on what we think and what we do.
You think you are immune to such influences? I am Galileo. I stand here and tell you: “Yet it moves.”
That which moves can exert its force in ways no mortal power ever before dated stem. I am here to dare this.
Body, Soul & Spirits
CONCEPTS OF THE SOUL
Life soul, selbst, psyché. life force (vitalstoff) as a body-soul immanently present in the body, the ‘inside’ (thymos) which is clearly connected to some part of the body (head, brain, heart, liver, kidneys etc.), it resides there and is associated with bodily functions (breathing, breath, blood circulation, sperm). The soul related to some natural element or phenomenon such as the wind blowing (duše), fog, water. Functions related to various notions/terms for the soul (life force, mental concepts, breathing, movement) etc.
The free soul, external soul, mirror or shadow soul, double ( alter ego, double, harm, fylgja etc.) as the seat of life force, as the depository of communication with the supernatural. It is outside the body either constantly or temporarily, it breaks away from the soul in dreams, in a trance etc. Living and dead, bodily and spiritual variants. Their connection with the soul which lives on after death and with mortal spirits. Its formations (human, animal, mirror image, light, foggy figure). It is only observable in certain situations, at certain times, before death; appears only in dreams or visions. An invisible protector, companion (guardian angel), a fate soul which determines destiny or prophecies the future. It is an emotional and intellectual tie with the alter ego of oneself or others (mara/Mahr/mora phenomena). Accompanying, guarding, helping and initiating spirits interpreted as formal variants of the free soul.
Narrative traditions related to notions of the soul, motifs in stories and legends for the free soul, shadow soul, external soul, as well as departure from the body, the soul departing in sleep, narrative metaphors for transformation, metamorphosis, for turning into a soul (flight, invisibility, becoming small, entering through the keyhole, travelling in a small object, walking on the water, turning into an animal etc.).
Special creatures who have a free soul or an alter ego since birth – two-souled creatures, double beings, shapeshifters: werewolves and mara/mora/Mahr/Alp/lidérc beings, vampires, witches and magicia
Body and soul – death, life after death, spirits of the dead
Death of an individual: death of the body and/or soul, the bodily and spiritual existence of the dead. Dead body (drying out, turning to dust, whether the soil will or will not admit it). Bodies living on, living dead bodies. Half-living or revived bodies, possessed dead bodies. What (sort of soul) dies along with the body, what survives the body. Souls living on in dead bodies and in bones.
Deathbed – with ancestors and relatives appearing, coming to take the soul. Companions of the soul (angels, saints, demons). The soul at the moment of death, which soul dies. Whether and how it leaves the body, where it goes, what shape it takes (breath, blood, fog, tiny man, tiny angel, naked baby, bee, bird etc.). Linguistic metaphors for the departure of the body. The place where the departing soul resides, its different stages, periods, dates of departure. Gradual death, bodily functions which persist temporarily after death, gradual departure. Transitory places, transitory existence: dead persons with no status who have not found a final place of rest, souls roaming in a liminal existence.
Souls and spirits in the other world, up, down, in heaven, in the underworld, in the woods, on the mountain, on an island, under water. The spirit of the dead in the other world – bodily and spiritual attributes and manifestations. Personal judgement and resurrection, resurrected body and/or soul – the fate of the body and/or soul in the meantime; souls in purgatory. Transition between different other worlds. Last judgement, the final destiny of the soul after resurrection.
Souls remaining in the soil, in the body, in the cemetery (in or around the grave), in the house, with the family; the dead of the family in the house, around the hearth, the soul of the ancestor in the wall, around the hearth, under the doorstep – in an animal form (house snake, talašom etc., ‘building sacrifices’). The spirit of the dead person in the likeness, statue, magical object (talisman, stoicheion). Dead people turned into guardian spirits of the family or the individual, ‘evil dead’ assaulting the family or the community.
Mythical beings fused or merged with the dead: fairies; ill-intentioned dead turned into demons; ‘two-souled creatures’ – people who have alter egos or living and dead variants (witches, magicians, vampires), demons. Spiritual beings which are half human or a transition between human and spirit – ‘light shadowed ones’, ‘wind-men’ (storm magicians, stuha, zduhac, planetnyk, chmurnik); fairies.
Spirits of the dead or possessing dead who return to the human community, to earth, who appear to humans (in a dream, trance, in an earthly setting as ghosts, in ’a bodily form’, individually or in a group), helping or assaulting humans, snatching them to death, hoping that they would influence their otherworldly destiny or demanding offerings. Occasions, time and purpose for returning/appearance; times and places of the dead on earth.
Supernatural communication – in the context of the body-soul and spirits
General, spontaneous, lay forms and professionals who use certain bodily/spiritual capacities, birth traits (they have a special soul, alter ego or peculiar guardian spirits etc, and communicate with a unique spirit world or other worlds).
Communication with the dead, with spirits of the dead, with demons of storm clouds, ‘walking with the fairies’ etc. Forms and functions of such communication (assaults by the dead, snatching the living for ‘initiation’, possession by the dead, poltergeist phenomena). Communication with dead people or spirits who appear in dreams. Communication through alter egos/doubles of the living. Lay and professional communication with the dead, with spirits through a double who had broken away from the person: horizontal, earthly travels of the double. Double beings, creatures with two souls and shapeshifters communicating between the worlds of nature and culture (werewolf), and between the human world and the night world of the dead and demons through their demonic alter egos: mora, Mahr, witch, strigoi, vampire etc. Helping spirits as the unique manifestations of the alter ego.
Techniques of the communication. Communication in a trance – inducing a trance, relevant techniques (spontaneous trance, self-suggestion, meditation, objects inducing a trance such as a mirror, water etc). The state of the body and the soul in a trance. Seers and fortune tellers reporting in a transe about their journey int he other world.
Ritual communication, symbolic and trance-inducing rites (fasting, St. Lucy’s stool, magic circle, magic wand, walking around the grave of the dead and the ‘places of the fairies’, beating them with the wand). Ritual invocation of the dead and of fairies, rites for acquiring spirit helpers or invoking the dead.
Spontaneous and professional, ritually induced activity of mediums. The clairvoyant as a medium possessed by the dead. The role of music, dance and turning round in inducing trance; ritual possession by the dead or by fairies (healing societies: rusalia, rusalje, calusari, etc.).
‘Journeys’ of the free soul – with companions, helping souls or spirits or without; the free soul rises out of the body, elevates itself, looks back and sees the body or the earth; falling in a tunnel, crossing the water in a vehicle, rising with the vapours into a storm cloud; flying in dream to a ’fairy heaven’; turning into an animal and thus joining the demonic werewolf troupe; travelling to a witches’ Sabbath on the back of animals, or of objects or metamorphosed into an animal; flying to the fairy other world with a troupe of fairies, making music and dancing etc.
Battles of the soul in dream or trance, against hostile harming spirits, storm souls in storm clouds, against assaulting werewolf demons, between good and bad – healing and harmful – spirits (in a possession trance); night battles (in a dream or trance) against the assaults of the dead or demons.
Narrative tradition, linguistic metaphors and textual representations of trance experiences and soul journeys, of communication through alter egos, of being snatched by the dead and of journeys to the other world, accounts of such experience, motifs in tales, legends and literature; folklore and literary motifs of journeys to the other world; narrative traditions of fairy other worlds and witches’ Sabbaths.
THE RELATIVITY OF BODY AND SOUL
by Iona Miller, c1992
...we are not concerned here with a philosophical, much less a religious, concept of the soul, but with the psychological recognition of the existence of a semiconscious psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function, [anima].
--C.G. Jung, TWO ESSAYS...
The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body. --James Hillman, RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY
Psychic and somatic symptoms express the soul's painful wounds and obstructions. The rational mind is incapable of deciding what is best for the soul. The mind can discover what is needed only by listening to and reflecting upon the subtle movement of the soul as it expresses itself in bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, images, ideas, and dreams.
--Robert M. Stein, "BODY AND PSYCHE"
Throughout history there have been many conceptions about the physical and spiritual nature of reality. Early on, they were confounded, though now separated into philosophy, physics, and religion. Each of these models or conceptions of mankind's relationship to nature and the divine was based in a belief-system which pre-conditioned all notions about the nature of the self.
The realm of psychology, with its own unique perspective on body and soul, lies between the worlds of physical reality and spiritual heights. And, of course, there are many schools of thought in psychology, many of which, like behaviorism and humanism, do not consider the relevance of a notion of soul as motivating factor. On the other hand, transpersonal psychology accepts the validity of the spiritual to the point where its primary psychological orientation may recede into the background.
Jungian psychology, and its avant-garde form, imaginal psychology, seek to maintain the primacy of the image as a direct expression of soul. As a discipline, it alleges that soul is a primary experience, and seeks to give her a voice. The realm of psyche is a subjective world of depth and meaning that is sometimes corporeal, sometimes not. Entry into this style of consciousness means heightened awareness of subjective realities.
Each "thing" speaks of the gods, or archetypal qualities and forces. It boldly asserts that not even technology and inorganic matter are inherently soulless.
Psyche
Imaginal psychology's main proponent, James Hillman, suggests it is only the literalist, objective world of Newtonian mechanics and the Christian apocalypse that is "dead." This school of psychology views many "spiritual" notions as products of a monotheistic style of consciousness.
It puts forth the view that soul is a pluralistic expression, rather than an individual quality. It upholds a polytheistic perspective which is more in line with the primitive concepts of the nature of soul. It views notions like"spiritual soul," "material body," and "spiritual body" metaphorically, rather than literally. Each god or archetype has its relative, characteristic style of consciousness and way of seeing through the nature of things.
Jung and his followers have shown that certain mind-sets lead to biased fantasies about the nature of the body, the soul, and the cosmos. Psyche is essentially related to soma because it is rooted in organic structure. The intimacy of this relationship is not fully understood. It is a realm of mystery which brings in its wake phenomena such as synchronicity and psychosomatic disorders.
Religion and superstition undermined any remotely objective viewpoint about the physical nature of the universe until the Enlightenment. Then scientists armored themselves against incursions of the divine with Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian duality. Descarte split mind from body, and equated the soul with the ego and mind, thus disenfranchising it. The mechanistic, "clockwork universe" was based on the primacy of underlying order. The universe was perceived as chaos tending toward order, with each atom following God's great plan.
This notion of an orderly universe was superceded by the unpredictable phenomena of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. We have found that beneath the apparent order is complexity, a world of chaos that self-generates order, which dissolves back into chaos. Even orderly motion is ultimately unpredictable due to initial conditions and even the slightest of random intruding influences. So, the universe may still be "God's plan," but its basis is irrational, not rational.
Physics
Physics is a form of philosophy which makes educated guesses about the nature of reality and our existence. It invites us to "look at it this way..." Scientific revolutions demonstrate that these are not ultimate statements about the nature of reality. They are relative, state-of-the-art hypotheses. This particular type of natural philosophy includes many universal laws, however, which reflect the way things seem to be from the current point of view.
It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated and a priori beliefs about existence. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.
Einstein showed us that, in physics, all perspectives are relative to the position of the observer. He discovered this by imagining he was riding on a beam of light. This relativity holds true in psychology also, depending on what assumed truths one holds. Notions of soul and body are not describing any irreducible reality. These notions are relative realities, reflecting our personal understanding of the nature of reality. They emerge from our specific worldview about the way things (including ourselves) work.
Beliefs
What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. Research shows our beliefs and opinions are largely conditioned by the belief system of our peer group. The day-to-day influence of convention creates a consensus opinion about reality and is a big influence on lifestyle. Much of consensus is a tacit agreement to overlook certain kinds of information, especially if it doesn't fit the "party line."
Beliefs are subject to radical reversal in some instances--the process of conversion. Jung called this 180 degree shift in consciousness enantiodromia. Conversions arise from a desperate need, from exposure to a new peer group with different attitudes and values, or through embracing a broader worldview, or by covert means like propaganda and brainwashing.
The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels. We never directly perceive ourselves, soul, or God. We don't perceive our bodies directly, only our sensory impressions. But we do have first-hand experience of our body-image, soul-image, and God images. That is all we know directly. The rest is pure speculation.
Relative viewpoints condition our concepts of reality, body and soul. A given individual may hold several within himself. For example, a rational scientist may find no empirical evidence for soul in her normal methods of investigation, but it does not prevent her continuing practice and belief in her faith. The emotional self will not be denied, even if it is held discrete from the workplace.
Body
Historically, the body (and matter in general) has been a spiritual battle-ground. Because of the bi-polar nature of our being (or our perception of bi-polarity), the human spirit naturally comes into conflict with our earthy and material needs. These primal drives create conflict between spirituality and instinctuality or sensuality. But the conflict is a matter of perception and psychological perspective.
In the West, flesh was condemned for "original sin", a mandate forced on the body by so-called "spiritual" pontification. This mandate was extended to include the condemnation of all matter. In the East, the perception of any solid substance was declared a mental phenomena. Matter was seen merely as an expression of universal mind, reduced to a gross state known as maya. In this state all matter is subject to karma, the natural consequences of active existence. In this worldview, the soul is continuously recycled. Both philosophies reject materialism, and the body with it.
So matter is merely a convincing illusion in one view, while in another it is inherently evil, the very opposite of God. The notion of immanence holds, on the other hand, along with Pantheism and Animism, that all matter, formless or substantive, is naturally infused with the divine. All agree that matter occupies space and time and is perceived by the senses. Philosophically, matter is the formless material of the universe of sensory experience. Each of these ideas, maya and the "fall," provides a coherent worldview, yet remains discrete and congruent only within its own belief system, with its a priori assumptions unexamined.
In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mind/body split fostered by Cartesian thinking, which is also non-relativistic.
The image of the disembodied modern individual is one of an over-rational "walking head," not a whole human being. Our modern need is not for further disembodiment by transcending off into salvation in the nether-realms of space, not for more out-of-body experiences. Rather, we almost desperately need to create ways of truly inhabiting our bodies, unsplit by Puritanical and Cartesian residue.
Soul
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try.
Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has "opened" us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
We can find soul in the body. It speaks metaphorically in body language (how closed or open one is to life and experience), body talk ("he's a pain in the neck," "I can't stomach that"), symptoms, and displacements. Conversion reactions change psychological dis-ease into concrete ailments. Jung said the gods have become diseases and there is a god within every disease. Noticing that psychic element and giving it voice is psychological soul-making. We can also look at our behavior, emotions, thoughts, and styles of consciousness psychologically.
Spirit
The conflict over the body is really between spirit and spirit, good and bad, polarized. But it is popularized as a split between spirit and matter, with the soul as intermediary. To compound the problem, in linguistics and beliefs, spirit and soul have become mis-identified with one another by theology and philosophy. Philosophy, for the Greeks was an adventure undertaken for its own sake, without dogma, rites, or sacred entities.
These disciplines pull the soul in opposite directions, leaving the alienated ego rejecting both mystical experience and the imperfection of the body. Thus we need recourse to priests (for spirituality), therapists (for psychological insight), and doctors (to interpret the condition of the body).
All healing appears to come from without, when we cannot heal our own dis-ease. The body is betrayed and mentally abandoned. Symptoms become something to get rid of, while the soul has no recourse to a higher power. Then the body becomes tyrannical, ruling the self with addictions and psychosomatic complaints. It has many ways of manifesting dis-ease.
The entire choice between spirit and body, inner and outer, has its source in identification with the ego. Ego maintains itself by creating conflicts from opposing drives within. It suppresses one and makes you believe you have chosen freely. The dilemma comes from the ego, not the soul.
Matter, spirit, and ego fight over the soul. Yet soul is a primary experience. Each wants its unique fantasy to reign uppermost. So, the first task is to distinguish soul from spirit, so the body may unite and be enlivened by both. In this process, primacy is given to the perspective of psyche or soul. This is a psychological approach--not spiritual or religious--giving voice to soul.
Divine Feminine
It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies, the world of nature, and the imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
All images arise from either body processes (instinct) or psychic forms (spirit). Whether instinct-controlled or spirit-controlled, they are related to physiological processes. They appear psychologically as images, but work physiologically. They produce emotional or visceral aspects, but not in any causal way. The images don't produce reactions. The image is the entire psychophysical gestalt.
We have considered three relative perspectives from which the notion of soul may be viewed: theological, philosophical, and psychological. Each has its own distinct notion about the body. Like Jung, we are not referring to a religious or philosophical concept of either body or soul. Soul may or may not ultimately be a disembodied, immortal thing as Zoroaster, Plato, and The Bible suggest.
They uphold the pervasive cultural view that soul is a transcendent entity, distinct from the body, that participates in an idealistic afterlife. No one alive can say for sure, and what about this life, here and now? Psyche's view speaks directly to our whole personalistic experience, with its transpersonal elements.
The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.
Like the psyche, or life-breath, of the early Greeks, this notion of soul is like that of the butterfly which always stays close to the ground. It is an airy thing, hovering lightly, without heroically soaring to the heights. In this model, there are no abstract flights of fancy into spirit's realm, no transcending off into subtle "spirit bodies" mistakenly distinguished as aspects of the soul. These urges are real, but they belong to spirit.
Image & Metaphor
Rather, the soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters." Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind/body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world.
Even physics shows us we are continuous with that world. Our skin-boundary is an illusion. We literally exchange gases and atoms with one another, and the world. The turn-over of matter in the body means there is no single, stable structure over time--just a duration of consciousness.
The line between organic and inorganic matter is indistinguishable at the subatomic level. All that exists is alive with motion. Both body and mind are the realm of psyche which can manifest as particular behaviors, psychosomatic illnesses, emotional patterns, mental and spiritual beliefs, and synchronistic events.
Mystics tell us that the entire world of phenomena is of the nature of mind or consciousness. Modern quantum mechanics seems to uphold this view from the scientific side. There is no solid matter, when you get right down to it--only waves of energy, "quantum fuzz", and probabilities. So, matter is no more tangible, nor less divine than the intangible energy or light from which it congeals. It is a spiritual notion that matter is a debased form of energy.
But the perspective of spirit would not have us confuse the creation with the Creator. Yet, in some sense, the light is the Light, in the metaphorical, if not literalistic or concretistic sense. We are merely a local outcropping of individuality, embedded in a continuum of cosmic connectivity, a webwork of relationship. In so many words, it means, "We are the world!"
"In here" and "out there" become moot when the subatomic nature of matter is truly understood. It becomes easier to see the nature of psyche as the underlying, living, divine field of all experience and phenomena. At the deepest level, we are physically indistinguishable from the cosmos at the quantum level.
Biophysics
Our existence is one of an indeterminate electromagnetic field, rather than a distinct chemical entity. Divinity is not off somewhere else, long ago, or in the future. We don't need to leave the body, die, or travel through time and space to find it in "pie-in-the-sky" salvation. As the Buddhists note, all is self, or Atman, here and now always.
The universal EM field is a primary physical, if not corporeal reality. Our apparently discrete existence is contiguous with it. In this model there is no mandate for a "soul-as-spirit body" to leave or vacate the body for purification, enlightenment, or union with divinity. Only our state of consciousness keeps us from that moment-by-moment realization. Direct psychological experience tells us that "I AM THAT."
We are psychological beings, composed of body and soul. Psychic life is physical and mental. Spirit enlivens soul--it manifests through soul. Soul animates the body. Soul enlivens and tends to favor the body. The body unites with spirit and soul by becoming "saturated" with them, immersed in their essence.
Denial
Denial of the body by a disembodied spiritual drive leads to ascensionism. It may be an escapist, transcendence fantasy. It is a way of keeping life at bay. In the provisional life one is always waiting to live life if things are just so. We can reinhabit or re-own the body in consciousness and experience ourselves as total psychosomatic beings. Spirit can be grounded in the body by making practical use of spiritual insights.
The harmonization of spirituality and instinctuality leads to wholeness. For example, in sexuality, a spirit-body split leads to an inability to see one sexual partner as both sexy and spiritually inspiring. This may manifest through circumstances or a psychological complex. It is an aspect of the Madonna-whore complex.
Alchemy
The whole person, on the other hand, views the sex act as the divine marriage of spirit and soul, God/Goddess, Shiva/Shakti. It epitomizes the universal cycle of creation/destruction, mind and matter in play. This attitude exalts body, soul, and spirit. It is akin to a nature mystic experience where the outer divine resonates and enters the body.
The ancient art of alchemy was the search for the God-head in matter. The alchemical task was to unify spirit and soul in the body. Psychic reality means to be in soul, esse in anima, as Jung put it. It means an enlarged experience of concrete reality to include the realm of the psyche, a dialogue with events, situations, and circumstances.
Body is made complete, not by perfecting it, but by spiritualizing it. It becomes the vehicle of the "incarnating Self." Spirit is attracted to matter and matter to spirit. Matter gets purpose and meaning from spirit. An "immortal body" now means grounding of the spirit. The uniting of soul, body, and spirit was called the Unus Mundus, or One World in alchemy.
As a psychophysical entity you experience the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World. The Jews knew it as the Shekinah. She is the embodiment of psyche, the animating force behind all events, images, and material forms. Soul functions both in the body and through projection in the physical world. Psychic reality means to be-in-soul, through embodiment (soma) or enlivenment (psyche)--perceiving images viscerally (soma) and mentally (psyche).
Acknowledgement of this force does not constitute Goddess worship--only recognition of the archetypal reality of nature, and our nature. She is a way of reclaiming the divinity of body, matter, and world. The Soul of the World notion, though repressed, is part of the return of the Feminine.
Hillman invites us into this world:
Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.
Hillman suggests therapy shift its focus from saving the soul of the individual to saving the soul of the world, resurrection of the world, rather than man--a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. He says we have, in essence, taken and stored the world soul within ourselves. "There is no 'in here' and 'out there'. We should give it back."
Physical reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. It "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. They are integrated with feeling, mind, and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality.
We need to learn how to be in our souls, just as we had to learn to reinhabit the body. Being-in-soul implies that you are being suffused with spirit.
Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process. Their conjunction, or marriage, means spirit is reborn whenever you are in touch with soul. They are opposites, so the interplay is eternal. Just observe without attachment the interaction of soul and spirit, distinct yet conjoined. Hold the tension of the opposites.
When spirit as energy and matter as form are in balance, the body becomes the living "Temple of the Spirit." The notion of a soul's immortality comes to mean direct experience of non-spatial, non-temporal, four-dimensional reality--the realm of relativity.
Life soul, selbst, psyché. life force (vitalstoff) as a body-soul immanently present in the body, the ‘inside’ (thymos) which is clearly connected to some part of the body (head, brain, heart, liver, kidneys etc.), it resides there and is associated with bodily functions (breathing, breath, blood circulation, sperm). The soul related to some natural element or phenomenon such as the wind blowing (duše), fog, water. Functions related to various notions/terms for the soul (life force, mental concepts, breathing, movement) etc.
The free soul, external soul, mirror or shadow soul, double ( alter ego, double, harm, fylgja etc.) as the seat of life force, as the depository of communication with the supernatural. It is outside the body either constantly or temporarily, it breaks away from the soul in dreams, in a trance etc. Living and dead, bodily and spiritual variants. Their connection with the soul which lives on after death and with mortal spirits. Its formations (human, animal, mirror image, light, foggy figure). It is only observable in certain situations, at certain times, before death; appears only in dreams or visions. An invisible protector, companion (guardian angel), a fate soul which determines destiny or prophecies the future. It is an emotional and intellectual tie with the alter ego of oneself or others (mara/Mahr/mora phenomena). Accompanying, guarding, helping and initiating spirits interpreted as formal variants of the free soul.
Narrative traditions related to notions of the soul, motifs in stories and legends for the free soul, shadow soul, external soul, as well as departure from the body, the soul departing in sleep, narrative metaphors for transformation, metamorphosis, for turning into a soul (flight, invisibility, becoming small, entering through the keyhole, travelling in a small object, walking on the water, turning into an animal etc.).
Special creatures who have a free soul or an alter ego since birth – two-souled creatures, double beings, shapeshifters: werewolves and mara/mora/Mahr/Alp/lidérc beings, vampires, witches and magicia
Body and soul – death, life after death, spirits of the dead
Death of an individual: death of the body and/or soul, the bodily and spiritual existence of the dead. Dead body (drying out, turning to dust, whether the soil will or will not admit it). Bodies living on, living dead bodies. Half-living or revived bodies, possessed dead bodies. What (sort of soul) dies along with the body, what survives the body. Souls living on in dead bodies and in bones.
Deathbed – with ancestors and relatives appearing, coming to take the soul. Companions of the soul (angels, saints, demons). The soul at the moment of death, which soul dies. Whether and how it leaves the body, where it goes, what shape it takes (breath, blood, fog, tiny man, tiny angel, naked baby, bee, bird etc.). Linguistic metaphors for the departure of the body. The place where the departing soul resides, its different stages, periods, dates of departure. Gradual death, bodily functions which persist temporarily after death, gradual departure. Transitory places, transitory existence: dead persons with no status who have not found a final place of rest, souls roaming in a liminal existence.
Souls and spirits in the other world, up, down, in heaven, in the underworld, in the woods, on the mountain, on an island, under water. The spirit of the dead in the other world – bodily and spiritual attributes and manifestations. Personal judgement and resurrection, resurrected body and/or soul – the fate of the body and/or soul in the meantime; souls in purgatory. Transition between different other worlds. Last judgement, the final destiny of the soul after resurrection.
Souls remaining in the soil, in the body, in the cemetery (in or around the grave), in the house, with the family; the dead of the family in the house, around the hearth, the soul of the ancestor in the wall, around the hearth, under the doorstep – in an animal form (house snake, talašom etc., ‘building sacrifices’). The spirit of the dead person in the likeness, statue, magical object (talisman, stoicheion). Dead people turned into guardian spirits of the family or the individual, ‘evil dead’ assaulting the family or the community.
Mythical beings fused or merged with the dead: fairies; ill-intentioned dead turned into demons; ‘two-souled creatures’ – people who have alter egos or living and dead variants (witches, magicians, vampires), demons. Spiritual beings which are half human or a transition between human and spirit – ‘light shadowed ones’, ‘wind-men’ (storm magicians, stuha, zduhac, planetnyk, chmurnik); fairies.
Spirits of the dead or possessing dead who return to the human community, to earth, who appear to humans (in a dream, trance, in an earthly setting as ghosts, in ’a bodily form’, individually or in a group), helping or assaulting humans, snatching them to death, hoping that they would influence their otherworldly destiny or demanding offerings. Occasions, time and purpose for returning/appearance; times and places of the dead on earth.
Supernatural communication – in the context of the body-soul and spirits
General, spontaneous, lay forms and professionals who use certain bodily/spiritual capacities, birth traits (they have a special soul, alter ego or peculiar guardian spirits etc, and communicate with a unique spirit world or other worlds).
Communication with the dead, with spirits of the dead, with demons of storm clouds, ‘walking with the fairies’ etc. Forms and functions of such communication (assaults by the dead, snatching the living for ‘initiation’, possession by the dead, poltergeist phenomena). Communication with dead people or spirits who appear in dreams. Communication through alter egos/doubles of the living. Lay and professional communication with the dead, with spirits through a double who had broken away from the person: horizontal, earthly travels of the double. Double beings, creatures with two souls and shapeshifters communicating between the worlds of nature and culture (werewolf), and between the human world and the night world of the dead and demons through their demonic alter egos: mora, Mahr, witch, strigoi, vampire etc. Helping spirits as the unique manifestations of the alter ego.
Techniques of the communication. Communication in a trance – inducing a trance, relevant techniques (spontaneous trance, self-suggestion, meditation, objects inducing a trance such as a mirror, water etc). The state of the body and the soul in a trance. Seers and fortune tellers reporting in a transe about their journey int he other world.
Ritual communication, symbolic and trance-inducing rites (fasting, St. Lucy’s stool, magic circle, magic wand, walking around the grave of the dead and the ‘places of the fairies’, beating them with the wand). Ritual invocation of the dead and of fairies, rites for acquiring spirit helpers or invoking the dead.
Spontaneous and professional, ritually induced activity of mediums. The clairvoyant as a medium possessed by the dead. The role of music, dance and turning round in inducing trance; ritual possession by the dead or by fairies (healing societies: rusalia, rusalje, calusari, etc.).
‘Journeys’ of the free soul – with companions, helping souls or spirits or without; the free soul rises out of the body, elevates itself, looks back and sees the body or the earth; falling in a tunnel, crossing the water in a vehicle, rising with the vapours into a storm cloud; flying in dream to a ’fairy heaven’; turning into an animal and thus joining the demonic werewolf troupe; travelling to a witches’ Sabbath on the back of animals, or of objects or metamorphosed into an animal; flying to the fairy other world with a troupe of fairies, making music and dancing etc.
Battles of the soul in dream or trance, against hostile harming spirits, storm souls in storm clouds, against assaulting werewolf demons, between good and bad – healing and harmful – spirits (in a possession trance); night battles (in a dream or trance) against the assaults of the dead or demons.
Narrative tradition, linguistic metaphors and textual representations of trance experiences and soul journeys, of communication through alter egos, of being snatched by the dead and of journeys to the other world, accounts of such experience, motifs in tales, legends and literature; folklore and literary motifs of journeys to the other world; narrative traditions of fairy other worlds and witches’ Sabbaths.
THE RELATIVITY OF BODY AND SOUL
by Iona Miller, c1992
...we are not concerned here with a philosophical, much less a religious, concept of the soul, but with the psychological recognition of the existence of a semiconscious psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function, [anima].
--C.G. Jung, TWO ESSAYS...
The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body. --James Hillman, RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY
Psychic and somatic symptoms express the soul's painful wounds and obstructions. The rational mind is incapable of deciding what is best for the soul. The mind can discover what is needed only by listening to and reflecting upon the subtle movement of the soul as it expresses itself in bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, images, ideas, and dreams.
--Robert M. Stein, "BODY AND PSYCHE"
Throughout history there have been many conceptions about the physical and spiritual nature of reality. Early on, they were confounded, though now separated into philosophy, physics, and religion. Each of these models or conceptions of mankind's relationship to nature and the divine was based in a belief-system which pre-conditioned all notions about the nature of the self.
The realm of psychology, with its own unique perspective on body and soul, lies between the worlds of physical reality and spiritual heights. And, of course, there are many schools of thought in psychology, many of which, like behaviorism and humanism, do not consider the relevance of a notion of soul as motivating factor. On the other hand, transpersonal psychology accepts the validity of the spiritual to the point where its primary psychological orientation may recede into the background.
Jungian psychology, and its avant-garde form, imaginal psychology, seek to maintain the primacy of the image as a direct expression of soul. As a discipline, it alleges that soul is a primary experience, and seeks to give her a voice. The realm of psyche is a subjective world of depth and meaning that is sometimes corporeal, sometimes not. Entry into this style of consciousness means heightened awareness of subjective realities.
Each "thing" speaks of the gods, or archetypal qualities and forces. It boldly asserts that not even technology and inorganic matter are inherently soulless.
Psyche
Imaginal psychology's main proponent, James Hillman, suggests it is only the literalist, objective world of Newtonian mechanics and the Christian apocalypse that is "dead." This school of psychology views many "spiritual" notions as products of a monotheistic style of consciousness.
It puts forth the view that soul is a pluralistic expression, rather than an individual quality. It upholds a polytheistic perspective which is more in line with the primitive concepts of the nature of soul. It views notions like"spiritual soul," "material body," and "spiritual body" metaphorically, rather than literally. Each god or archetype has its relative, characteristic style of consciousness and way of seeing through the nature of things.
Jung and his followers have shown that certain mind-sets lead to biased fantasies about the nature of the body, the soul, and the cosmos. Psyche is essentially related to soma because it is rooted in organic structure. The intimacy of this relationship is not fully understood. It is a realm of mystery which brings in its wake phenomena such as synchronicity and psychosomatic disorders.
Religion and superstition undermined any remotely objective viewpoint about the physical nature of the universe until the Enlightenment. Then scientists armored themselves against incursions of the divine with Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian duality. Descarte split mind from body, and equated the soul with the ego and mind, thus disenfranchising it. The mechanistic, "clockwork universe" was based on the primacy of underlying order. The universe was perceived as chaos tending toward order, with each atom following God's great plan.
This notion of an orderly universe was superceded by the unpredictable phenomena of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. We have found that beneath the apparent order is complexity, a world of chaos that self-generates order, which dissolves back into chaos. Even orderly motion is ultimately unpredictable due to initial conditions and even the slightest of random intruding influences. So, the universe may still be "God's plan," but its basis is irrational, not rational.
Physics
Physics is a form of philosophy which makes educated guesses about the nature of reality and our existence. It invites us to "look at it this way..." Scientific revolutions demonstrate that these are not ultimate statements about the nature of reality. They are relative, state-of-the-art hypotheses. This particular type of natural philosophy includes many universal laws, however, which reflect the way things seem to be from the current point of view.
It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated and a priori beliefs about existence. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.
Einstein showed us that, in physics, all perspectives are relative to the position of the observer. He discovered this by imagining he was riding on a beam of light. This relativity holds true in psychology also, depending on what assumed truths one holds. Notions of soul and body are not describing any irreducible reality. These notions are relative realities, reflecting our personal understanding of the nature of reality. They emerge from our specific worldview about the way things (including ourselves) work.
Beliefs
What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. Research shows our beliefs and opinions are largely conditioned by the belief system of our peer group. The day-to-day influence of convention creates a consensus opinion about reality and is a big influence on lifestyle. Much of consensus is a tacit agreement to overlook certain kinds of information, especially if it doesn't fit the "party line."
Beliefs are subject to radical reversal in some instances--the process of conversion. Jung called this 180 degree shift in consciousness enantiodromia. Conversions arise from a desperate need, from exposure to a new peer group with different attitudes and values, or through embracing a broader worldview, or by covert means like propaganda and brainwashing.
The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels. We never directly perceive ourselves, soul, or God. We don't perceive our bodies directly, only our sensory impressions. But we do have first-hand experience of our body-image, soul-image, and God images. That is all we know directly. The rest is pure speculation.
Relative viewpoints condition our concepts of reality, body and soul. A given individual may hold several within himself. For example, a rational scientist may find no empirical evidence for soul in her normal methods of investigation, but it does not prevent her continuing practice and belief in her faith. The emotional self will not be denied, even if it is held discrete from the workplace.
Body
Historically, the body (and matter in general) has been a spiritual battle-ground. Because of the bi-polar nature of our being (or our perception of bi-polarity), the human spirit naturally comes into conflict with our earthy and material needs. These primal drives create conflict between spirituality and instinctuality or sensuality. But the conflict is a matter of perception and psychological perspective.
In the West, flesh was condemned for "original sin", a mandate forced on the body by so-called "spiritual" pontification. This mandate was extended to include the condemnation of all matter. In the East, the perception of any solid substance was declared a mental phenomena. Matter was seen merely as an expression of universal mind, reduced to a gross state known as maya. In this state all matter is subject to karma, the natural consequences of active existence. In this worldview, the soul is continuously recycled. Both philosophies reject materialism, and the body with it.
So matter is merely a convincing illusion in one view, while in another it is inherently evil, the very opposite of God. The notion of immanence holds, on the other hand, along with Pantheism and Animism, that all matter, formless or substantive, is naturally infused with the divine. All agree that matter occupies space and time and is perceived by the senses. Philosophically, matter is the formless material of the universe of sensory experience. Each of these ideas, maya and the "fall," provides a coherent worldview, yet remains discrete and congruent only within its own belief system, with its a priori assumptions unexamined.
In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mind/body split fostered by Cartesian thinking, which is also non-relativistic.
The image of the disembodied modern individual is one of an over-rational "walking head," not a whole human being. Our modern need is not for further disembodiment by transcending off into salvation in the nether-realms of space, not for more out-of-body experiences. Rather, we almost desperately need to create ways of truly inhabiting our bodies, unsplit by Puritanical and Cartesian residue.
Soul
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try.
Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has "opened" us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
We can find soul in the body. It speaks metaphorically in body language (how closed or open one is to life and experience), body talk ("he's a pain in the neck," "I can't stomach that"), symptoms, and displacements. Conversion reactions change psychological dis-ease into concrete ailments. Jung said the gods have become diseases and there is a god within every disease. Noticing that psychic element and giving it voice is psychological soul-making. We can also look at our behavior, emotions, thoughts, and styles of consciousness psychologically.
Spirit
The conflict over the body is really between spirit and spirit, good and bad, polarized. But it is popularized as a split between spirit and matter, with the soul as intermediary. To compound the problem, in linguistics and beliefs, spirit and soul have become mis-identified with one another by theology and philosophy. Philosophy, for the Greeks was an adventure undertaken for its own sake, without dogma, rites, or sacred entities.
These disciplines pull the soul in opposite directions, leaving the alienated ego rejecting both mystical experience and the imperfection of the body. Thus we need recourse to priests (for spirituality), therapists (for psychological insight), and doctors (to interpret the condition of the body).
All healing appears to come from without, when we cannot heal our own dis-ease. The body is betrayed and mentally abandoned. Symptoms become something to get rid of, while the soul has no recourse to a higher power. Then the body becomes tyrannical, ruling the self with addictions and psychosomatic complaints. It has many ways of manifesting dis-ease.
The entire choice between spirit and body, inner and outer, has its source in identification with the ego. Ego maintains itself by creating conflicts from opposing drives within. It suppresses one and makes you believe you have chosen freely. The dilemma comes from the ego, not the soul.
Matter, spirit, and ego fight over the soul. Yet soul is a primary experience. Each wants its unique fantasy to reign uppermost. So, the first task is to distinguish soul from spirit, so the body may unite and be enlivened by both. In this process, primacy is given to the perspective of psyche or soul. This is a psychological approach--not spiritual or religious--giving voice to soul.
Divine Feminine
It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies, the world of nature, and the imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
All images arise from either body processes (instinct) or psychic forms (spirit). Whether instinct-controlled or spirit-controlled, they are related to physiological processes. They appear psychologically as images, but work physiologically. They produce emotional or visceral aspects, but not in any causal way. The images don't produce reactions. The image is the entire psychophysical gestalt.
We have considered three relative perspectives from which the notion of soul may be viewed: theological, philosophical, and psychological. Each has its own distinct notion about the body. Like Jung, we are not referring to a religious or philosophical concept of either body or soul. Soul may or may not ultimately be a disembodied, immortal thing as Zoroaster, Plato, and The Bible suggest.
They uphold the pervasive cultural view that soul is a transcendent entity, distinct from the body, that participates in an idealistic afterlife. No one alive can say for sure, and what about this life, here and now? Psyche's view speaks directly to our whole personalistic experience, with its transpersonal elements.
The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.
Like the psyche, or life-breath, of the early Greeks, this notion of soul is like that of the butterfly which always stays close to the ground. It is an airy thing, hovering lightly, without heroically soaring to the heights. In this model, there are no abstract flights of fancy into spirit's realm, no transcending off into subtle "spirit bodies" mistakenly distinguished as aspects of the soul. These urges are real, but they belong to spirit.
Image & Metaphor
Rather, the soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters." Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind/body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world.
Even physics shows us we are continuous with that world. Our skin-boundary is an illusion. We literally exchange gases and atoms with one another, and the world. The turn-over of matter in the body means there is no single, stable structure over time--just a duration of consciousness.
The line between organic and inorganic matter is indistinguishable at the subatomic level. All that exists is alive with motion. Both body and mind are the realm of psyche which can manifest as particular behaviors, psychosomatic illnesses, emotional patterns, mental and spiritual beliefs, and synchronistic events.
Mystics tell us that the entire world of phenomena is of the nature of mind or consciousness. Modern quantum mechanics seems to uphold this view from the scientific side. There is no solid matter, when you get right down to it--only waves of energy, "quantum fuzz", and probabilities. So, matter is no more tangible, nor less divine than the intangible energy or light from which it congeals. It is a spiritual notion that matter is a debased form of energy.
But the perspective of spirit would not have us confuse the creation with the Creator. Yet, in some sense, the light is the Light, in the metaphorical, if not literalistic or concretistic sense. We are merely a local outcropping of individuality, embedded in a continuum of cosmic connectivity, a webwork of relationship. In so many words, it means, "We are the world!"
"In here" and "out there" become moot when the subatomic nature of matter is truly understood. It becomes easier to see the nature of psyche as the underlying, living, divine field of all experience and phenomena. At the deepest level, we are physically indistinguishable from the cosmos at the quantum level.
Biophysics
Our existence is one of an indeterminate electromagnetic field, rather than a distinct chemical entity. Divinity is not off somewhere else, long ago, or in the future. We don't need to leave the body, die, or travel through time and space to find it in "pie-in-the-sky" salvation. As the Buddhists note, all is self, or Atman, here and now always.
The universal EM field is a primary physical, if not corporeal reality. Our apparently discrete existence is contiguous with it. In this model there is no mandate for a "soul-as-spirit body" to leave or vacate the body for purification, enlightenment, or union with divinity. Only our state of consciousness keeps us from that moment-by-moment realization. Direct psychological experience tells us that "I AM THAT."
We are psychological beings, composed of body and soul. Psychic life is physical and mental. Spirit enlivens soul--it manifests through soul. Soul animates the body. Soul enlivens and tends to favor the body. The body unites with spirit and soul by becoming "saturated" with them, immersed in their essence.
Denial
Denial of the body by a disembodied spiritual drive leads to ascensionism. It may be an escapist, transcendence fantasy. It is a way of keeping life at bay. In the provisional life one is always waiting to live life if things are just so. We can reinhabit or re-own the body in consciousness and experience ourselves as total psychosomatic beings. Spirit can be grounded in the body by making practical use of spiritual insights.
The harmonization of spirituality and instinctuality leads to wholeness. For example, in sexuality, a spirit-body split leads to an inability to see one sexual partner as both sexy and spiritually inspiring. This may manifest through circumstances or a psychological complex. It is an aspect of the Madonna-whore complex.
Alchemy
The whole person, on the other hand, views the sex act as the divine marriage of spirit and soul, God/Goddess, Shiva/Shakti. It epitomizes the universal cycle of creation/destruction, mind and matter in play. This attitude exalts body, soul, and spirit. It is akin to a nature mystic experience where the outer divine resonates and enters the body.
The ancient art of alchemy was the search for the God-head in matter. The alchemical task was to unify spirit and soul in the body. Psychic reality means to be in soul, esse in anima, as Jung put it. It means an enlarged experience of concrete reality to include the realm of the psyche, a dialogue with events, situations, and circumstances.
Body is made complete, not by perfecting it, but by spiritualizing it. It becomes the vehicle of the "incarnating Self." Spirit is attracted to matter and matter to spirit. Matter gets purpose and meaning from spirit. An "immortal body" now means grounding of the spirit. The uniting of soul, body, and spirit was called the Unus Mundus, or One World in alchemy.
As a psychophysical entity you experience the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World. The Jews knew it as the Shekinah. She is the embodiment of psyche, the animating force behind all events, images, and material forms. Soul functions both in the body and through projection in the physical world. Psychic reality means to be-in-soul, through embodiment (soma) or enlivenment (psyche)--perceiving images viscerally (soma) and mentally (psyche).
Acknowledgement of this force does not constitute Goddess worship--only recognition of the archetypal reality of nature, and our nature. She is a way of reclaiming the divinity of body, matter, and world. The Soul of the World notion, though repressed, is part of the return of the Feminine.
Hillman invites us into this world:
Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.
Hillman suggests therapy shift its focus from saving the soul of the individual to saving the soul of the world, resurrection of the world, rather than man--a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. He says we have, in essence, taken and stored the world soul within ourselves. "There is no 'in here' and 'out there'. We should give it back."
Physical reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. It "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. They are integrated with feeling, mind, and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality.
We need to learn how to be in our souls, just as we had to learn to reinhabit the body. Being-in-soul implies that you are being suffused with spirit.
Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process. Their conjunction, or marriage, means spirit is reborn whenever you are in touch with soul. They are opposites, so the interplay is eternal. Just observe without attachment the interaction of soul and spirit, distinct yet conjoined. Hold the tension of the opposites.
When spirit as energy and matter as form are in balance, the body becomes the living "Temple of the Spirit." The notion of a soul's immortality comes to mean direct experience of non-spatial, non-temporal, four-dimensional reality--the realm of relativity.
Strigoi, by Nicholas de Vere
In Romanian mythology, strigoi are the troubled souls of the dead rising from the grave. Some strigoi can be living people with certain magical properties. Some of the properties of the strigoi include: the ability to transform into an animal, invisibility, and the propensity to drain the vitality of victims via blood loss. Strigoi are also known as immortal vampires.
A strigoaică (singular feminine form) is a witch. Strigoi is different than a moroi. They are close relatives of the werewolves known as "pricolici" or "vârcolaci", the latter also meaning "goblin" at times.
These names are derived from strigă, which in Romanian meant "scream" or "barn owl", cognate with Italian strega, which means "witch", and descended from the Latin word strix, for owl. Strigoi viu is a living vampiric witch. Strigoi mort is a dead (undead) vampire. They are most often associated with vampires or zombies.
According to Romanian mythology a strigoi has red hair, blue eyes and two hearts. The strigoi can change into a variety of animals, such as barn owls, bats, rats, cats, wolves, dogs, snakes, toads, lizards, and spiders/insects. They also have the ability to render themselves invisble. They're also known to be capable of creating damaging storms, blights, droughts, floods and even poltergeist activity. The strigoi in some accounts is also capable of a form of astral projection appearing as shadows or ghosts.
There are several ways for a deceased person to become a strigoi. For example, if a person dies before they are married they are at risk of becoming a vampire. Most often in a situation like this, the corpse is wed to another unmarried person around the same age to prevent them from returning from the grave. Should this technique fail, however, the strigoi will return to have sexual intercourse with their spouse, and will attack family members. The corpse should then be stabbed through the heart with a sickle or other piercing object, to prevent any more attacks.
Corpses walked over by cats are also at risk of become strigoi. To get rid of them, bury a bottle of wine near the grave. Six weeks later, dig it up and drink the wine with relatives. Whoever drinks the wine will be protected against the strigoi, who will not return. A person who is filled with pain and regret will turn into a cat or dog after death and return as a strigoi to torment his/her relatives. Piercing the body of the strigoi with a needle will prevent it from leaving the grave, as will placing a candle, coin or towel in the hand of the corpse. Walking around the grave with burning hemp will cause the strigoi to become helpless. One remedy against strigoi is to bury a bottle of whiskey with the corpse. The vampire will drink it and not return home.
If a child is born with a caul atop their head they are said to be likely to become a strigoi viu (a live strigoi).
If you know your Russian, “strigoi” is just a fancy word for “vampire.” Vampires have basically been dropped into every corner of the world during the past century, but they always feel right at home in places like Romania, Transylvania, and various other places whose names end in “-ia.” Strigoi is no exception; it’s off-kilter and not at all adherent to the typical Western co-option of the vampire legend, meaning the undead bloodsuckers haven’t felt this fresh in a while.
A strigoaică (singular feminine form) is a witch. Strigoi is different than a moroi. They are close relatives of the werewolves known as "pricolici" or "vârcolaci", the latter also meaning "goblin" at times.
These names are derived from strigă, which in Romanian meant "scream" or "barn owl", cognate with Italian strega, which means "witch", and descended from the Latin word strix, for owl. Strigoi viu is a living vampiric witch. Strigoi mort is a dead (undead) vampire. They are most often associated with vampires or zombies.
According to Romanian mythology a strigoi has red hair, blue eyes and two hearts. The strigoi can change into a variety of animals, such as barn owls, bats, rats, cats, wolves, dogs, snakes, toads, lizards, and spiders/insects. They also have the ability to render themselves invisble. They're also known to be capable of creating damaging storms, blights, droughts, floods and even poltergeist activity. The strigoi in some accounts is also capable of a form of astral projection appearing as shadows or ghosts.
There are several ways for a deceased person to become a strigoi. For example, if a person dies before they are married they are at risk of becoming a vampire. Most often in a situation like this, the corpse is wed to another unmarried person around the same age to prevent them from returning from the grave. Should this technique fail, however, the strigoi will return to have sexual intercourse with their spouse, and will attack family members. The corpse should then be stabbed through the heart with a sickle or other piercing object, to prevent any more attacks.
Corpses walked over by cats are also at risk of become strigoi. To get rid of them, bury a bottle of wine near the grave. Six weeks later, dig it up and drink the wine with relatives. Whoever drinks the wine will be protected against the strigoi, who will not return. A person who is filled with pain and regret will turn into a cat or dog after death and return as a strigoi to torment his/her relatives. Piercing the body of the strigoi with a needle will prevent it from leaving the grave, as will placing a candle, coin or towel in the hand of the corpse. Walking around the grave with burning hemp will cause the strigoi to become helpless. One remedy against strigoi is to bury a bottle of whiskey with the corpse. The vampire will drink it and not return home.
If a child is born with a caul atop their head they are said to be likely to become a strigoi viu (a live strigoi).
If you know your Russian, “strigoi” is just a fancy word for “vampire.” Vampires have basically been dropped into every corner of the world during the past century, but they always feel right at home in places like Romania, Transylvania, and various other places whose names end in “-ia.” Strigoi is no exception; it’s off-kilter and not at all adherent to the typical Western co-option of the vampire legend, meaning the undead bloodsuckers haven’t felt this fresh in a while.
Holographic Memory
Holographic Memory
Neuroscientist, Karl Pribram was originally struck by the similarity of the hologram idea and Bohm's idea of the implicate order in physics, and contacted him for collaboration. In particular, the fact that information about an image point is distributed throughout the hologram, such that each piece of the hologram contains some information about the entire image, seemed suggestive to Pribram about how the brain could encode memories. Pribram was encouraged in this line of speculation by the fact that DeValois and DeValois had found that "the spatial frequency encoding displayed by cells of the visual cortex was best described as a Fourier transform of the input pattern." This holographic idea led to the coining of the term "holonomic" to describe the idea in wider contexts than just holograms.
The theory was first developed by Karl Pribram in collaboration with David Bohm (a protege of Albert Einstein's). Holographic Memory (or as Pribram and Bohm refer to it Holonomic Memory) is based on the principle that memory is stored in the brain in much the same way that information is stored on a three-dimensional holographic image. The three-dimensional aspect of holography allows for much more detailed storage of information.
In fact, "state of the art" computer research is presently focused on using holographic storage to increase the capacities of our computers a thousand fold. The characteristics of the electromagnetic potentials in the brain provide a three-dimensional mechanism for storage of our human experiences which can be "read" (remembered) using the coherent rhythm of our consciousness. Normally our heartbeat and breathing rate provide that coherent rhythm, however, meditation which generates alpha rhythms (or the beat frequency of alpha tones of the holographic memory mp3) create a much more precise rhythm to store and read this information.
Earlier, researchers like Lorente de No, in 1938 and Burns, in 1954 demonstrated the presence of oscillating loops in brain tissue that sustain themselves for periods of up to thirty minutes without additional input. It is likely that the electrical oscillations in these loops alter the internal chemistry of neural cells to make them more responsive to similar rhythmic oscillations later, thus providing a physiological basis for memory storage. Hilgard and Marquis in 1940 and Hebb in1949 did, in fact, suggest that these neural reverberating loops were responsible for memory storage.
Dr. Rafeal Elul among others has carried out experiments demonstrating that individual neurons not only produce electrical pulse trains, but also emit and absorb extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves of ten to one hundred hertz. [One hertz is equal to one cycle per second. It is abbreviated, 'hz'.] Each neural loop is thus capable of acting as an extremely low frequency radio transmitter and receiver. Other research confirms that the brain is very responsive to extremely low frequencies. Moruzzi and McGoun (1954) demonstrated that exposure to brain stimulation at extremely low frequencies could make an animal very alert at 300 hz or fall asleep at ten hertz. Gavalas-Medici (1977) reported that after four hours exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields, monkeys experienced time distortion and their brain waves were matched in phase and frequency with the imposed waves. Other studies with human subjects indicate that humans have longer reaction times when exposed to frequencies of three to seven hz and shorter reaction times when exposed to frequencies of ten to twelve hz (Konig, 1962; Hamer, 1966; and Friedman, Becker, & Bachman, 1967).
Both V.I. Rusinov (1973) and E. Roy John (1967) have demonstrated that extremely low frequency 'tracer' waves can be impressed upon brain wave patterns of animals. Rusinov and his coworkers have reported the presence of steady-potential levels in various parts of the brain which may be physiological correlates of the perceptual 'state' of a person. These areas of electrical potential shift and change more slowly than do the electrical potentials of individual neurons. The oscillation frequency of these steady-potential levels range from approximately .5 to 1 hz.
Rusinov has created artificial 'steady-potential levels' or 'dominant foci' by applying a six-millivolt (six thousandths of a volt) electrical potential to the motor cortex of animals. The motor cortex is the part of the brain that controls muscle movement. Presenting a ten hz audio tone to an animal with a six millivolt potential injected into the part of the cortex corresponding to its left forelimb, results in muscle flexion and movement of the left forelimb. After ten or so presentations of the tone in the presence of the electrical 'dominant focus', a ten hz 'tracer' wave is found to occur in the area of the 'dominant focus', and the ten hz tone continues to cause the forelimb movement even after the six millivolt potential has been removed. This provides a physiological correlate of the classical conditioning phenomena first demonstrated by Pavlov (1927).
Rusinov has suggested that these dominant foci are similar in character to what is naturally produced in the brain by the action of the reticular activating system when ones attention is focused. (The reticular activating system is a very diffuse neuron network in the brain associated with the level of arousal of the brain.) These naturally occurring areas of electrical excitation may be the physiological correlates of the perceptual state of consciousness at that instant. Over time, these dominants shift and dissolve, to be replaced by others in the stream of consciousness. The various perceptual states are usually associated with specific frequencies (i.e. alert consciousness - fifteen to thirty hz, relaxation or meditation - five to ten hz, and sleep- zero to four hz).
There is considerable theoretical support for these observed brain activities based upon well-established principles of electromagnetic interaction. When an electric current flows through a conductor, whether that conductor is a wire or a neuron, it generates an electromagnetic field or 'radio wave'. The laws of physics require that each neural loop generate electromagnetic waves that are resonant at specific frequencies corresponding to the length of time it takes for the electrical signal to traverse the loop. (Longer loops will have longer transit times and will feedback at lower frequencies.) The loops are, in effect, miniature radio antennae each transmitting information about a sensory event that has occurred.
Depending on what sensory information is occurring in the external environment, a certain set of these neural loops will be generating electromagnetic waves and the waves generated will interact, creating an interference pattern which is a holographic representation of the external environment. If a wave pattern remains long enough, it may alter the chemical responsiveness of the neural loops, thus providing a means by which the rhythm may be reproduced. The change in internal chemistry may change the rate at which charges can move through the neural loop and thus predispose the loop to respond only to specific frequencies or their harmonics (whole number multiples of the original frequency).
When a second set of sensory inputs occur, the frequencies already present and those coming in will affect the overall energy level in given regions of the brain. If the energy peaks are in step with each other they will add and if they are not they will subtract. (This is essentially the same thing that occurs in holography when light waves interfere with one another.) Inputs, which are coordinated with the presently existing pattern, will gain in strength and increase the overall response of the brain to them. Other neural loops may also start resonating to them. Thus, inputs that are repetitive will tend to gain strength relative to the overall background pattern of energy. They will stand out from the general background and become areas of focus.
Naturally, one's own heart rate and breathing pattern will be among the dominant rhythms which occur in the brain at all times. They interact with and modify the other fields present in the brain, altering the interference pattern accordingly. These rhythms will be 'stored' as a part of the overall hologram because neural loops will be more responsive to them. They will acquire the subjective value of ‘self’ or ‘that which is always present’. Newly generated holograms created by sensory input as we move through our environment may then be interpreted by the ever-present reference beam of 'self' or consciousness. Consciousness is not a true laser beam, but it is in a sense coherent in that its basic physiological rhythms maintain themselves over a period of time and have continuity. Meditation is one way of strengthening the reference beam of consciousness. Listening to a stereophonically generated Alpha Rhythm is another.
As other patterns from the environment mix with or beat against the internal rhythms, they will emerge to a greater or lesser degree as dominant energies and frequencies. These less frequent regularities of pattern will merge into concepts similar to the concept of self, but of slightly less importance. Because new sensory inputs that are similar will stimulate and activate these developing concepts, they will become the referents to which new stimuli are compared. It should be noted that this will occur in much the same way that Bergson’s earlier layers of memory modify the later layers. The complexes of energy fields that remain active in the brain form a consistent pattern of self and memory with which new holograms are continually compared via holographic interference of waveforms. Consciousness thus develops a memory and a sense of self that is essentially the same ‘self’ that has existed over the length of time that the brain has existed. It has constancy and consistency like Bergson’s snowball, but with perhaps greater flexibility.
As we think and perceive, the 'reference beam' which we refer to as consciousness interacts with the fluid hologram of experience and briefly attaches itself to a portion of it. We understand brief interaction as the duration of 'nowness' or the present. We do not experience the 'now' as a single fixed hologram like a vacation slide of the Grand Canyon. Instead, we compare the present input with the totality of our past experience and the internal representation we have constructed of the immediate past. The interaction of sensory signals, our internal bodily functions, and our memory creates the total holographic interference pattern that we experience at any given moment.
Copyright © 2006 Applied Cognitive Science
http://appliedcognitivescience.net/Holographic%20Memory.html
Neuroscientist, Karl Pribram was originally struck by the similarity of the hologram idea and Bohm's idea of the implicate order in physics, and contacted him for collaboration. In particular, the fact that information about an image point is distributed throughout the hologram, such that each piece of the hologram contains some information about the entire image, seemed suggestive to Pribram about how the brain could encode memories. Pribram was encouraged in this line of speculation by the fact that DeValois and DeValois had found that "the spatial frequency encoding displayed by cells of the visual cortex was best described as a Fourier transform of the input pattern." This holographic idea led to the coining of the term "holonomic" to describe the idea in wider contexts than just holograms.
The theory was first developed by Karl Pribram in collaboration with David Bohm (a protege of Albert Einstein's). Holographic Memory (or as Pribram and Bohm refer to it Holonomic Memory) is based on the principle that memory is stored in the brain in much the same way that information is stored on a three-dimensional holographic image. The three-dimensional aspect of holography allows for much more detailed storage of information.
In fact, "state of the art" computer research is presently focused on using holographic storage to increase the capacities of our computers a thousand fold. The characteristics of the electromagnetic potentials in the brain provide a three-dimensional mechanism for storage of our human experiences which can be "read" (remembered) using the coherent rhythm of our consciousness. Normally our heartbeat and breathing rate provide that coherent rhythm, however, meditation which generates alpha rhythms (or the beat frequency of alpha tones of the holographic memory mp3) create a much more precise rhythm to store and read this information.
Earlier, researchers like Lorente de No, in 1938 and Burns, in 1954 demonstrated the presence of oscillating loops in brain tissue that sustain themselves for periods of up to thirty minutes without additional input. It is likely that the electrical oscillations in these loops alter the internal chemistry of neural cells to make them more responsive to similar rhythmic oscillations later, thus providing a physiological basis for memory storage. Hilgard and Marquis in 1940 and Hebb in1949 did, in fact, suggest that these neural reverberating loops were responsible for memory storage.
Dr. Rafeal Elul among others has carried out experiments demonstrating that individual neurons not only produce electrical pulse trains, but also emit and absorb extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves of ten to one hundred hertz. [One hertz is equal to one cycle per second. It is abbreviated, 'hz'.] Each neural loop is thus capable of acting as an extremely low frequency radio transmitter and receiver. Other research confirms that the brain is very responsive to extremely low frequencies. Moruzzi and McGoun (1954) demonstrated that exposure to brain stimulation at extremely low frequencies could make an animal very alert at 300 hz or fall asleep at ten hertz. Gavalas-Medici (1977) reported that after four hours exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields, monkeys experienced time distortion and their brain waves were matched in phase and frequency with the imposed waves. Other studies with human subjects indicate that humans have longer reaction times when exposed to frequencies of three to seven hz and shorter reaction times when exposed to frequencies of ten to twelve hz (Konig, 1962; Hamer, 1966; and Friedman, Becker, & Bachman, 1967).
Both V.I. Rusinov (1973) and E. Roy John (1967) have demonstrated that extremely low frequency 'tracer' waves can be impressed upon brain wave patterns of animals. Rusinov and his coworkers have reported the presence of steady-potential levels in various parts of the brain which may be physiological correlates of the perceptual 'state' of a person. These areas of electrical potential shift and change more slowly than do the electrical potentials of individual neurons. The oscillation frequency of these steady-potential levels range from approximately .5 to 1 hz.
Rusinov has created artificial 'steady-potential levels' or 'dominant foci' by applying a six-millivolt (six thousandths of a volt) electrical potential to the motor cortex of animals. The motor cortex is the part of the brain that controls muscle movement. Presenting a ten hz audio tone to an animal with a six millivolt potential injected into the part of the cortex corresponding to its left forelimb, results in muscle flexion and movement of the left forelimb. After ten or so presentations of the tone in the presence of the electrical 'dominant focus', a ten hz 'tracer' wave is found to occur in the area of the 'dominant focus', and the ten hz tone continues to cause the forelimb movement even after the six millivolt potential has been removed. This provides a physiological correlate of the classical conditioning phenomena first demonstrated by Pavlov (1927).
Rusinov has suggested that these dominant foci are similar in character to what is naturally produced in the brain by the action of the reticular activating system when ones attention is focused. (The reticular activating system is a very diffuse neuron network in the brain associated with the level of arousal of the brain.) These naturally occurring areas of electrical excitation may be the physiological correlates of the perceptual state of consciousness at that instant. Over time, these dominants shift and dissolve, to be replaced by others in the stream of consciousness. The various perceptual states are usually associated with specific frequencies (i.e. alert consciousness - fifteen to thirty hz, relaxation or meditation - five to ten hz, and sleep- zero to four hz).
There is considerable theoretical support for these observed brain activities based upon well-established principles of electromagnetic interaction. When an electric current flows through a conductor, whether that conductor is a wire or a neuron, it generates an electromagnetic field or 'radio wave'. The laws of physics require that each neural loop generate electromagnetic waves that are resonant at specific frequencies corresponding to the length of time it takes for the electrical signal to traverse the loop. (Longer loops will have longer transit times and will feedback at lower frequencies.) The loops are, in effect, miniature radio antennae each transmitting information about a sensory event that has occurred.
Depending on what sensory information is occurring in the external environment, a certain set of these neural loops will be generating electromagnetic waves and the waves generated will interact, creating an interference pattern which is a holographic representation of the external environment. If a wave pattern remains long enough, it may alter the chemical responsiveness of the neural loops, thus providing a means by which the rhythm may be reproduced. The change in internal chemistry may change the rate at which charges can move through the neural loop and thus predispose the loop to respond only to specific frequencies or their harmonics (whole number multiples of the original frequency).
When a second set of sensory inputs occur, the frequencies already present and those coming in will affect the overall energy level in given regions of the brain. If the energy peaks are in step with each other they will add and if they are not they will subtract. (This is essentially the same thing that occurs in holography when light waves interfere with one another.) Inputs, which are coordinated with the presently existing pattern, will gain in strength and increase the overall response of the brain to them. Other neural loops may also start resonating to them. Thus, inputs that are repetitive will tend to gain strength relative to the overall background pattern of energy. They will stand out from the general background and become areas of focus.
Naturally, one's own heart rate and breathing pattern will be among the dominant rhythms which occur in the brain at all times. They interact with and modify the other fields present in the brain, altering the interference pattern accordingly. These rhythms will be 'stored' as a part of the overall hologram because neural loops will be more responsive to them. They will acquire the subjective value of ‘self’ or ‘that which is always present’. Newly generated holograms created by sensory input as we move through our environment may then be interpreted by the ever-present reference beam of 'self' or consciousness. Consciousness is not a true laser beam, but it is in a sense coherent in that its basic physiological rhythms maintain themselves over a period of time and have continuity. Meditation is one way of strengthening the reference beam of consciousness. Listening to a stereophonically generated Alpha Rhythm is another.
As other patterns from the environment mix with or beat against the internal rhythms, they will emerge to a greater or lesser degree as dominant energies and frequencies. These less frequent regularities of pattern will merge into concepts similar to the concept of self, but of slightly less importance. Because new sensory inputs that are similar will stimulate and activate these developing concepts, they will become the referents to which new stimuli are compared. It should be noted that this will occur in much the same way that Bergson’s earlier layers of memory modify the later layers. The complexes of energy fields that remain active in the brain form a consistent pattern of self and memory with which new holograms are continually compared via holographic interference of waveforms. Consciousness thus develops a memory and a sense of self that is essentially the same ‘self’ that has existed over the length of time that the brain has existed. It has constancy and consistency like Bergson’s snowball, but with perhaps greater flexibility.
As we think and perceive, the 'reference beam' which we refer to as consciousness interacts with the fluid hologram of experience and briefly attaches itself to a portion of it. We understand brief interaction as the duration of 'nowness' or the present. We do not experience the 'now' as a single fixed hologram like a vacation slide of the Grand Canyon. Instead, we compare the present input with the totality of our past experience and the internal representation we have constructed of the immediate past. The interaction of sensory signals, our internal bodily functions, and our memory creates the total holographic interference pattern that we experience at any given moment.
Copyright © 2006 Applied Cognitive Science
http://appliedcognitivescience.net/Holographic%20Memory.html
Dragon Descent & Ancestral Memories
In psychology, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time. It is based on the idea that common experiences of a species become incorporated into its genetic code, not by a process that encodes specific memories but by a much vaguer tendency to encode a readiness to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli.
Genetic memory is invoked to explain the racial memory postulated by Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology, racial memories are posited memories, feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious".
Some parapsychologists have postulated that specific experience is encoded in genes, and proposed this as an explanation for past life regression. However, most parapsychologists generally dismiss this, on grounds that in those cases where past life regression has been considered, the subjects have no genetic link with the people whose lives they are considered to have regressed to; and that the idea is unsound as a mechanism for explaining how events could be recalled from past lives of people at points in those lives after they had had children. Parapsychologists generally agree with the biological view that genetic traits are dispositional — i.e. that they merely encode a disposition to react in certain ways to environmental stimuli, and not actual memory or experience.
Genetic memory is invoked to explain the racial memory postulated by Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology, racial memories are posited memories, feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious".
Some parapsychologists have postulated that specific experience is encoded in genes, and proposed this as an explanation for past life regression. However, most parapsychologists generally dismiss this, on grounds that in those cases where past life regression has been considered, the subjects have no genetic link with the people whose lives they are considered to have regressed to; and that the idea is unsound as a mechanism for explaining how events could be recalled from past lives of people at points in those lives after they had had children. Parapsychologists generally agree with the biological view that genetic traits are dispositional — i.e. that they merely encode a disposition to react in certain ways to environmental stimuli, and not actual memory or experience.
Dragon Soul Keys: Deep Memory Work
Active Imagination
Deep Memory WorkPast life regression
Life between life session
Womb work in previous and current life
Why i choose my life - Mission & Purpose
Soul agreement knowledge
Past and current relations and meanings
Forgiveness and acceptance techniques
Meet and dialogue spirit guides, souls/people from past or current lives
Intuition enhanceing techniques
Healing portals
Meet your spirit counsel
Spirit library
Unlimited soul travel in time
Unlimited soul travel in universe
Dragon Dreamhealing
Tiamat is the Dragon of Chaos. Dreamhealing, rooted in Chaos Theory is a non-directive means of entering your symptoms and dreams, plumbingyour depths, and experiencing many layers of the psyche, including those of Ancestral and phylogenetic memories.
DRAGON DREAMHEALING
A Non-interpretive, Experiential Approach to Dream Journeys
by Iona Miller
nterpretive theories of dreams are called 'Dream Work.' But often they don't 'work,' because interpretive glosses of symbols don't get to the heart of the matter and actually stop the process. That is why it is 'work,' not 'healing.' Symbols are portals to deeper dimensions and do not require outside interpretation but call for deepening. Ancient Asklepian dreamhealing was non-interpretive and led to emergent healing that activates the spontaneous healing of placebo effect through dream journeys. Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment--"Chaosophy."
Dreamhealing: CHAOS & the Creative Consciousness Process
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD, by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
PART I: THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS
Chapter 1: Chaos Consciousness and Healing
Chapter 2: Dreamhealing - The Heart of Dreams
Chapter 3: Human Dimensions of Chaos Theory
Chapter 4: Ego and Healing - A Model of Consciousness
Chapter 5: Speculations on a New Paradigm
PART II: DREAMHEALING -
THE HEALING HEART OF DREAMS
Chapter 6: The Shaman/Therapist - Imagination, Creativity & Vision
Chapter 7: The Dream Journey as Heroic Quest
Chapter 8: The Dream Guide - Navigating the Stream of Consciousness
Chapter 9: Dream Journey Guidelines - The Practice of Dreamhealing
Chapter 10: Case Studies in Creativity
Bibliography
Index
DRAGON DREAMHEALING
A Non-interpretive, Experiential Approach to Dream Journeys
by Iona Miller
nterpretive theories of dreams are called 'Dream Work.' But often they don't 'work,' because interpretive glosses of symbols don't get to the heart of the matter and actually stop the process. That is why it is 'work,' not 'healing.' Symbols are portals to deeper dimensions and do not require outside interpretation but call for deepening. Ancient Asklepian dreamhealing was non-interpretive and led to emergent healing that activates the spontaneous healing of placebo effect through dream journeys. Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment--"Chaosophy."
Dreamhealing: CHAOS & the Creative Consciousness Process
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD, by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
PART I: THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS
Chapter 1: Chaos Consciousness and Healing
Chapter 2: Dreamhealing - The Heart of Dreams
Chapter 3: Human Dimensions of Chaos Theory
Chapter 4: Ego and Healing - A Model of Consciousness
Chapter 5: Speculations on a New Paradigm
PART II: DREAMHEALING -
THE HEALING HEART OF DREAMS
Chapter 6: The Shaman/Therapist - Imagination, Creativity & Vision
Chapter 7: The Dream Journey as Heroic Quest
Chapter 8: The Dream Guide - Navigating the Stream of Consciousness
Chapter 9: Dream Journey Guidelines - The Practice of Dreamhealing
Chapter 10: Case Studies in Creativity
Bibliography
Index
CHAOS CONSCIOUSNESS AND HEALING
ABSTRACT: Experiential therapy sessions have shown that as consciousness journeys deeper and deeper into the psyche, it eventually encounters a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. Those emerging from this non-ordinary state of consciousness report an increased sense of well-being ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. We known that research has shown that imagery can affect the immune system. Imagery journeys in the autonomous stream of consciousness may activate psychosomatic healing forces, such as the placebo effect.
Science thus brings us to the threshold of the ego and there leaves us to ourselves. --Max Plank
...the attractor does not consist of a simple point, curve or higher dimensional manifold, but contains an infinite complex of manifolds. --Edward Lorenz
CHAOS IN DAILY LIFE
Both the shamanic view and modern depth psychology embrace an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature. Sometimes this worldview is easier to achieve as an abstract thought than as an on-going perspective about life itself. Try as we might, we are so ingrained with the old mechanical-materialistic fantasy that we find our thoughts and attitudes slipping back toward causal models, perpetually denying the true nature of reality as we experience it. We have been conditioned since birth towards a conformist, orderly behavior that is deemed good for society, but is the death-knell of individuality. Much of the distortion in our worldview comes from our outmoded view of who we are, in terms of consciousness, awareness and perception.
Consensus reality doesn't represent any universal truth -- so-called "normal" consciousness is more of a cultural trance state (Tart, 1992). Integrating the new science of chaos theory can help us expand our understanding of reality. It impacts our sense of self as well as our concept of "how things work" in the universe. Allowing chaos back into our lives in a positive way also fosters the healing process. We have observed in experiential therapy that clients naturally gravitate in their inner journeys to a de-structured place. While there, they report feelings of rejuvenation and well-being. There are certain primary characteristics of chaos and chaotic systems (complex dynamic systems):
CHAOS IS:
1) deterministic
2) paradoxical
3) self-generative
4) self-iterating
5) self-organizing
6) intrinsically unpredictable
7) yet boundaried
8) and geometric
9) and sustained by complex feedback loops
CHAOTIC SYSTEMS ARE:
1) sensitive to initial conditions
2) disproportionately responsive to stimuli
3) translatable from micro- to macroscopic proportions
4) attractor centered
5) shuffled time/space
6) apparently acausal (actually enfolded; implicate/explicate)
7) qualitative
8) global phenomena
9) flexible/creative Each of these aspects can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife. In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. We have observed many dream journeys to which these descriptors could apply.
For example, the quality of shuffled time/space is seen in the precognitive or prophetic dream. An attractor-centered dream might focus around a specific psychological complex, which acts like a magnetic center [strange attractor] for emotional conflict. Chaotic systems are also complex, as are dreams. They represent systems that are far-from-equilibrium. Jung contended that dreams help maintain psychic balance.
The scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality as presently understood. Old psychological models have placed emphasis on order, and the overcoming of chaos. Yet chaos has a perhaps unrecognized value, in our psyche and physiology. Just as a healthy heart sometime goes into a chaotic pattern, turbulence and chaos help us break down old, outmoded structures in personality.
Even the deterioration of mental illness is quite purposeful in that it is the individual's attempt at healing and finding a new emergent order. Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities. It has been said that "any supreme insight is a metaphor." It has also been said that "the better the idea, the more likely it is to have been extremely vague." While this may not hold true in all cases, it is true that there is a certain quality of ambiguity in chaos and chaos consciousness which must simply be tolerated.
For example, this description of imaginative consciousness and "turbulence" from artist Naum Gabo in OF DIVERS ARTS: The artist's mind is a turbulent sea full of all kinds of impressions, responses and experiences as well as feelings and emotions. Some experts on art assert that the artist does not really have more of these emotions and feelings and impressions than the ordinary man who is not an artist. This may be true or false, but what they apparently fail to see and assert is that in the artist these feelings and responses are in a more agitated state. He is more concerned with them, and the urge to express these experiences is more intense in him than it is in the ordinary man. And that, I suppose, is the reason why the artist's mind is not only more turbulent but sometimes, alas, troublesome also...
The chaos of our human lives is re-iterated from the subatomic through the cosmic level. Chaos is the matrix of creation. It provides a bridge for unfolding "heaven on earth", a means of manifesting and grounding spiritual energy, that is not only creative but healing. A state-of-the-art empirical foundation is essential for any well-grounded philosophy of life and a realistic self-concept. We create limited subjective fantasies about ourselves and the nature of the universe all the time. Usually we do not examine our a priori beliefs which condition those notions. We grasp our beliefs as though they were the most precious of gemstones, rather than just models or constructs. The true nature of perception dictates that we experience only a simulation of ourselves and the world-at-large (Tart, 1992).
From our worldview come symbols and images which a small part of our brain, and an even smaller part of our mind and consciousness clings to, attempting to structure reality out of chaos. By clutching these beliefs, we then limit our experience of reality to that defined by them. For the most part, these underlying beliefs are rooted in notions about the nature of reality which are derived from 17th century physics and philosophy. The old mechanistic view asserts that mind and matter are separate. Newton's discoveries bolstered the notion that reality is a universe consisting of separate objects interacting with one another according to fixed laws of cause and effect. The laws are learned through objective observation and measurement. Causal laws fit with our direct experience of the universe and are therefore supported as feeling "right" by intuition.
Einstein said our language requires coordinates. Since we live in a culture which is mostly based on this science and its technology, we generally accept these notions as a given, as axioms too basic to be questioned. We may know about the irrational, counter-intuitive concepts of quantum mechanics, yet it hardly seems to affect us. Our beliefs are still largely rooted in cause-and-effect. From these axioms we also construct our ego and personality which is a collection of secondary beliefs about what we are and how we can relate to and control our surroundings. It seems to work.
Using this system of thought and belief, we are able to control much of the physical world around us. That is, until catastrophic chaos intervenes in our lives. It may come in the form of natural disaster, random victimization, the bifurcation of a love triangle [paramour as strange attractor], or a crisis in transition from one phase of life to another. Sometimes the intrusion is a spontaneous unusual psychic or spiritual experience which can neither be integrated nor assimilated into daily life. It also will not be ignored. It may come, therefore, in the form of a recurrent dream, or other means of hailing the conscious mind from the subconscious.
Spiritual emergencies, ranging from addiction to near-death-experiences, call for a breaking down of the old system to the primal or fundamental (or chaotic) level. Disintegration is the direction of these processes, which create opportunities for us to "get it back together' at a healthier, more enriched, enlarged level, with a new primal self-image. As powerful as the scientific approach seems to be, it leaves many phenomena unexplained. There are strategic holes in the fortress of classical scientific doctrine. For example, objective observation and the principles of cause and effect.
In 1938 Einstein wrote, "Physical concepts are free creatures of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." Quantum mechanics further attacks the principles of objectivity and separativity. The implications of this theory take us into a strange reality in which we not only influence reality but actually create it from our minds and expectations. Realities exist as possibilities which come into being through our consciousness and intentionality.
To put it in other terms, apparently the universe exists only within the context of our relationship to it. John Wheeler, a physicist from Princeton University, writes, "May the universe be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate?...The vital act is the act of participation. 'Participator' is the given incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term 'observer' of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says."
Henry Pierce Strapp, another quantum physicist, states that the world is "Not a structure built out of existing analyzable entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationship to the whole."
In the field of medical science, there are many cases of healing which conventional or classical medicine or psychology cannot explain. These gaps have been labeled placebo and spontaneous remission. Yet, this does no more than hide our ignorance behind words. There is, however, a striking parallel between healing and the new physics. As in the new physics, healing too occurs in a realm of connectivity and mutual creation. Healer and "healee" are not separate objective entities following fixed laws with the former manipulating the physical components of the latter. They are partners in a process of creating a universe in which mind and body are no longer separate. They establish a flow in harmonious accord with each other and the rest of creation, a state of ease rather than dis-ease.
The emergent healing paradigm helps us evolve out of the body/mind or nature/spirit split instilled by our culture during the era of mechanistic science and the industrial revolution. We now live in an information society. Information theory describes the fundamental quality of information as an agent of change. Great minds have been moving in these systems-theory directions for some time, but there seems to be a lag-time in the psyche of the general population. Even though some may comprehend it mentally, it rarely transforms into a truly transformative, deep knowledge on all levels of awareness, much less what it could mean in terms of mental health.
Chaos theory gives us a visual mathematical language for charting strange attractors in dynamical systems. They can be applied within an individual psyche or to interactive relationships. This technology has already been applied to human behavior. Order and chaos in the emotional realm have been studied by mathematicians and psychiatrists. Their studies produced models of a person's chaotic or unstable behavior in comparison to their stable behavior. Stable behavior can be imagined as being like the sky, unstable behavior like mountains, with little pockets or "caves" of serenity within them. These little sanctuaries could be fostered through therapy. Stability can be increased through therapy within a broader landscape of chaos and pathology. It may also lead to new ways to individualize psychotherapy, like dreamhealing. [see DREAMHEALING: THE HEART OF DREAMS, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Even mental illness may relate to the phenomena of strange attractors in the brain or emotional field. Some researchers believe, for example, that a number of mental disorders, such as manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia, occur when biological regulatory systems cease to operate at their normal, fixed point and change suddenly to another stable but abnormal point. In chaos theory, when an attractor disappears due to sudden catastrophic change, the system becomes structureless and experiences a term of "transient chaos" before another attractor is found.
The primal image is the attractor and it forms based on the organism's interaction with the "Not-I" or environment. An individual's personal myth or my theme might be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor. In another phase of life, the focus could change to others. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion. The ego can suffer greatly from this jerking around by the deep forces within, especially if it doesn't have enough information about its purpose to derive meaning from the experience. For some, the disruption leads to a nervous breakdown or psychotic break, while for others it opens the doors into a new freedom and expanded sense of self.
Chaos is part of a greater structure/process, for want of a better title, called evolution. Order emerges spontaneously from chaos, and order tends to degenerate into chaos when forms are obsolete. Chaos is also the root of the creative process. In chaos, the search for information is open. As soon as you think you "know" something, you close down the search for new information and solutions. There are many questions which arise within the model of human development based on chaos theory.
We can conjecture why certain attractors or complexes form. We really don't know why some may become prominent and others fade into the background. But we do know that when two or more are competing for divergent behavior and attitudes, the resulting psychic split can be painful, setting up a deep conflict which is not be easy to resolve. If it is extreme, it leads to psychological fragmentation. Free choice may be a factor, but our choices are limited by our attitudes about what we believe is possible for us. The only solution is to dive to the deepest levels, seeking evolutionary transformation -- a quantum leap in consciousness that can contain opposites within paradox. The first step in understanding how these attractors affect us has to do with our personal filters, our distorted experiences of raw archetypal energy.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHAOS
In our studies of healing, and an attempt to synthesize them into a consistent ideal, we have developed a model. Consciousness may be viewed as a field interacting with other fields. In physics, a field is a medium of connectivity, an extent of space within which lines of force (magnetic and electrical) are in operation. It is also called a field of force. When two fields, like electricity and magnetism, interact they create electromagnetic waves which include all forms of radiant energy from light and radio waves, to gamma and cosmic rays.
Electromagnetism is magnetism developed by electricity. EM fields interact with the smallest units of matter energetically exciting the components of the fundamental geometry of space in fields which are in a constant state of fluctuation. The consciousness field is not limited to the conscious awareness of human beings, as in the Jungian concept. Rather, it is the creative dynamic matrix behind all life and inorganic manifestation. It is self-generating. Consciousness begets consciousness. It is self-iterating (or repeating--chronic), and self-organizing. When consciousness interacts with the space/time field or electromagnetic (EM) fields, then individual consciousness emerges.
Since the consciousness field represents all potential, its qualitative nature must be paradoxical for it encompasses the opposites. Still, once it begins interacting with other fields and begins to "make psyche matter," certain boundary conditions are imposed. The determinism of a chaotic system guides the growth and maturation process. The original site interaction of consciousness with time/space creates not only the material basis, but the organism's strange attractor, which we refer to as the "primal image." It is the blueprint of the entity. Jungian psychologists are exploring the possible relationships between strange attractors and archetypes or complexes [see PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES].
In our view these attractors or complexes are secondary formations, even though the concept of a primal guiding image shares much with the Jungian concept of self. They are merely similar. This view is neither archetypal nor complex-oriented. Rather than limiting exploration piecemeal to a few select archetypes or specific complexes, it approaches the individual as a whole, not as a collection of fragmented parts. Human beings reflect the qualities of chaotic systems. As living creatures we are sensitive to the initial conditions of our genetics and conception.
We can easily respond disproportionately to stimuli. A child's actual brain chemistry and neural patterns can be changed by childhood trauma. This creates a rigid structure through the process of conditioning. The trauma may come from an insignificant incident such as parents yelling, for the child perceives them as gigantic, all-mighty gods essential for survival. Needless to say, severe trauma inflicts an even deeper imprint or distortion of the personality. Seeds of change (for good or bad) planted in our lives can quickly grow later to transformations of vast proportion.
For example, any choice point we face in life where we leave an alternate "road not taken," leads to a wide variety of different life experiences and opportunities. We are attractor-centered, whether we conceive of that primal attractor as divinity, the higher self, the core self, the Jungian self, the Gestalt self, or that deepest sense of self--our primal self image (including its unconscious aspects). As an attractor, it contains an infinite complex of forms and images. Elsewhere, we have delved into this more deeply [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Our consciousness is capable of experiencing shuffled space/time. It happens during dreams, deja-vu, precognition, and other psychic experiences. We also experience apparently acausal phenomena, termed synchronicity by Jung. Physicist David Bohm calls enfolded information "implicate" when it is enfolded in a latent state of potential. It is called "explicate" when it is unfolded or actualized (observable). Our entire lives are encoded in the initial moment of conception, yet the details of that unfolding potential are inherently unpredictable. Our lives are the explication of the initial conditions present at conception. That initial blueprint is subject to many perturbations along the way.
Chaotic systems are qualitative. Even physics proves it is impossible for us to comprehend anything but subjective perceptions. When it comes to human life, quality is generally valued over quantity faced with impairment. We adapt to changing circumstances in our environment because we are flexible and creative. Because of this we have covered the globe with civilization. Our physical bodies and our societies are sustained by complex feedback loops. Our moods are controlled by excititory and inhibitory brain hormones. The political process is part of the social feedback system. The consciousness field is that which relates us to the entire universe. It may be viewed as chaos, or energy in a primal chaotic state, prior to any solidification into matter. It is a field of energy, not a "thing." It is able to take on infinite forms, including images.
Time is also a field. Consciousness may intersect with time at a 90 degree angle, in which case a linear flow seems to emerge. Or, it may fold over in a contiguous way, producing a "bending" or folding of space. In far-from-equilibrium conditions, this folding or kneading would create layers of time/space that are simply connected, like pieces of layered pastry dough. Points in time widely separated in the linear sense, become intimately juxtaposed. In this model, consciousness would have the ability to "pop" around in time. The site interaction with other fields by consciousness is what we view as the intrusion of the strange attractor. Where two fields interact, that is the strange attractor, which then attracts and forms the consciousness around it.
The other field, whatever it is interacting with, attracts the energy around it too. And this is what we create our experience from. The strange attractor is the intersection of the fields. We can view it linearly, or in non-linear fashion. This is speculation, on the touching of fields creating reality at a profound level. When consciousness intersects with other fields it seems to create matter, or the illusion of matter, and we can manipulate that, change forms, etc. Consciousness evolution equals the process of chaos moving into structure, dissolving back into chaos, and reconstituting into structure. It requires a breaking up or dissolving of old forms back into the primal state.
For some reason in dreamhealing sessions, each new structure that comes out of the primal chaos seems to be an evolution beyond, or a superior structure, or a better structure than the previous one that went into the chaos. Now we don't know why this should be, but it does seem to be that way consistently. We can speculate that this generalizes to the whole process of evolution. In any event, it has been observed specifically in dream journeys which move deep into the psyche. Of course, it pre-supposes that the journey gets to the depth where chaotic consciousness is experienced to begin with. Whenever we begin with a structure (the currently defined personality), we commit it back to the chaos (the primal chaotic state of consciousness).
The new structure, the new image that emerges is always better, always more healed, more whole, evolved beyond the old structure that was so limiting. Rigidities seem to dissolve and reform in that state of consciousness, like a modern equivalent of the old alchemical maxim--"solve et coagula." This may relate to a deeper, unknown law of chaos. What is known is that we observe it repeatedly in the dreamhealing process. If you take any portion of a fractal and expand it, you find it is self-similar. This reveals a harmony with shamanic law--that organization repeats itself at all levels of organization. Patterns repeat at all levels of organization. It is much like finding the universe in a grain of sand. Evolution in consciousness comes with a quantum shift in awareness. That quantum shift occurs during the period in which the evolving structure is in chaos.
So if you are in a dreamhealing process, experiencing for example, the multiple consciousness of the Earth Mother as decay, you may follow that to the point of total disintegration. Since you are identified with that state of consciousness at the time, your personal awareness dives down into the chaos, journeying to the most fundamental or primal state of consciousness--chaos. That is when the shift in primal image of self becomes possible, because it is totally de-structured. During that period of chaos is when it (and you with it) are changed from this to that, in a non-linear state.
From that, you can see that you can consign your bound-up rigid energies (whether it is fear, pain, or whatever) to their primal state so that the transformation of that energy frees it to take on a new quality. Again, this is an alchemical notion: "Only that which has been separated can be properly joined." Consciousness healing takes place in quantum shifts. The old model of psychological integration changed and integrated a little piece at a time, building toward a "strong coping ego." The personal experience of the quantum shift is in the imagery of dreams and dream journeys. It appears spontaneously.
For example, here is how one client described the journey to the inner healer in a self-guided session: First the dream: I am in a sunny field of green grass. I see an old college friend coming toward me across the field. His name is Mark. I'm also trying to set up a screen to watch a movie on. The screen is two pieces of painted green wood. With the dream in my mind, I choose to become the dream. I am the field of grass. I notice how close to the earth I am, indeed, how I am the earth. I feel an aliveness as grass that I have forgotten as myself. I take in the sunlight to nourish me. I feel drawn into the roots of the grass. I have a sense of the rootedness of the grass, so I let myself go into the earth through the roots. This leads me into a series of colors and textures which I discover as the journey continues underground. I let myself go on, and I arrive eventually at the center of the earth, where a vibrant orange lava surrounds me and penetrates me with its heat. With this main sensation in my body, I find myself settling into the flow and resting, taking in the heat all around me. The journey has come to a momentary ending, but the ending brings movement and flow into my awareness. I have found a place of transformational energy. From the bright green field, I've come to rest in a warm, embracing lava-energy deep inside me. I have contacted the inner healer, the healing state of my dream.
The real healing IS this quantum shift in mental, emotional, even physical structure. The approach is one of wholeness and following the image.
The dreamhealing process is aimed at addressing this very profound level from the beginning. Progress comes unpredictably in quantum leaps in consciousness. Carl Simonton's work using imagery with cancer patients touches on this. The use of imagery with the intent of bringing about healing seems to mobilize forces deep within us that were formerly unaccessible. Nature as structure is reflected at all levels of organization just like fractal math shows.
If you look at a tiny piece of a fractal, the whole structure is reflected within it, much like a hologram. This is because it is self-similar and self-iterative. Any tiny piece reflects the whole. It is much the same in holography where a tiny piece of the negative can produce the whole image, though the detail may be fuzzier. This happens in human systems also. Applying Transactional Analysis to corporations shows that if you look at the pathology of the organization, it is related to the pathology of the individuals within that organization--and very often most to the founder or director. And vice versa.
We re-encounter the "holographic notion" in shamanism. The worldview is that we are reflections of the great Mother Earth. What happens to us is reflected in Gaea in the rocks and the trees, etc. At any level of organization nature repeats herself. As you watch the cycles of nature, you observe that things go into life and death and rebirth, as energy changes form. If that is happening all around you, what is to make you think you are any different than that. You are part of nature, unlike in the "civilized" or "scientific" views which set us apart. If you are truly not separate, you can expect, quite naturally, to go through the same cycle yourself, in consciousness as well as in biology. Further, you can trust that and embrace that flow of life, death, and rebirth.
Mystics and scientists show us that "change is stability. This is very much part of the shamanic perspective. We find that, in therapy, people get into "earth consciousness" and they perceive that they are healing the earth as well as themselves. This idea may be subjective, but not necessarily grandiose or delusional. It is unusual and perhaps unpredictable from their presenting problem. For example, in one experience a woman became a throbbing like the heartbeat of the entire planet. She felt the healing within herself as that of the planet. From the shaman's perspective, the healing of any component contributes to the healing of the whole, though it may be difficult to substantiate for the rational mind. To some extent this view becomes less subjective if we look at fractal theory in which any change in a part also changes the whole.
As further evidence of dream's chaotic nature, a case can be made that dreams are holograms. In using dream symbols for healing work, it seems that "all roads lead to Rome." A person can enter the dream through any of the symbolic doorways and derive a very different experience of consciousness along the way. Still, following the symbols deeper and deeper one arrives at that healing, primal level. As long as the image is followed back faithfully, the connection can be made from any beginning point in any dream, old or new. That is one reason we never need to go back to a particular dream symbol that has not been worked, but can pick up the process entering through a fresh dream image.
The deeper mind always presents the best departure point for current conflicts and turmoil, that which seeks healing. The part is contained within the whole, but the whole is also contained in each part, according to the holographic model of reality. Therefore, by changing the part, therapy changes the whole. So philosophically, it makes sense to approach the whole person, rather than the part which contains less-detailed information. If the therapist chooses the part to work on, it is limited. Psyche has many options to choose from its deeper wisdom. Small changes in therapy can translate into exponential changes over time, since chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions. They quickly pump up small changes to larger changes in awareness. Part of the overall healing model is that WE ARE NOT SEPARATE. And, to the extent that we can embrace that model, it becomes more of a reality in the most profound sense.
CHANGE IS STABILITY
The difference between inanimate and animate life (or consciousness) is only a reflection of the interaction of the conscious field with the time field, or based on the level of observation. Inert matter is alive with subatomic activity. If you look closely enough, or remove the time-bound aspects, the similarity is there. Inanimate objects have a capacity to reconstitute just as organic systems do. Any definition of the difference between animate and inanimate existence is time-bound within a given period of time. Because of the conservation of energy, our constituents will participate in many animate and inanimate processes over the aeons.
For example, all the elements within our bodies were cooked in the crucible of some ancient star, which exploded in a supernova millennia ago. When you remove the dimension of time, the definitions "star" and "human" do not hold. We share the same essence. Maybe this is why mystic/magician Aleister Crowley said "Every man and every woman is a star." The similarity of archetypes (pervasive patterns which seem to repeat in nature and the psyche) may be a function of genetic structure.
Genetics provides a sense of universality amongst all humankind of senses and experiences of structure. Jung proposed a psychoid nature, (beyond and independent of human experiences), for archetypes. In the deepest sense, these archetypal energies are trans-human, transpersonal. Nevertheless, out of chaotic systems, we see self-similar, though not identical, patterns emerging. This is a property of chaotic systems. Our perceptions of these forms, our sensory patterns, may simply create archetypes out of them. There is that deeper structure of forms that arises spontaneously from chaos.
The limitations of our perceptions and senses, based on genetics, conditions what "archetypes" we tend to perceive and live out. Perhaps Jung mistook human perception of archetypes for those being "common" archetypes; whereas chaos may not be bound to that. A tree, for example, has the ability to experience its existence in its own way, at least from the shamanic perspective of animism. We can speculate about trees, or rocks, or fish with their different perceptual apparatus. They naturally will experience different perceptions of so-called archetypes based on their forms of "perception." They may also "notice" and create archetypes of their own out of persistent patterns. But, these will be very different from the kind of perceptions our intellect and genetic organs are capable of focusing on. Therefore, an archetype may be a function of genetic commonality.
Strange attractors in this view are based on the genetic structure that attracts the conscious energy around it. Out of chaotic systems we see self-similar patterns emerging. Our perceptions create archetypes by adding words and concepts. When it comes to creating a human being, one of the first things that is created out of that consciousness field interaction with EM fields, gravity and time, is the genetic structure which is the blueprint around which our physical structure evolves [see EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY, Miller and Webb, 1973].
Our physical structure, as dictated by DNA, in turn determines emotional structure, sensory structure, and perceptual structure. Our sensory apparatus arises out of the genetic structure. The strange attractor is that touching of fields which then forms the physical and psychic structure. The relationships of our physical and emotional structure come out of their interaction, that interface, or nexus point.
Chaos may also be related to certain forms of divination, based on so-called chance, such as the I Ching, Tarot, or the Rune Stones. Divinatory procedures help us extract personal meaning from the chaotic jumble of divinatory elements. They mirror our subconscious and environment at that specific moment of observation. The structure of divinatory instruments also reveals much about the nature of the human psyche. There may be an infinite number of archetypes in the universe, but a select number are most influential in the lives of humanity. These are what get encoded into our divinatory systems as most relevant.
For example, let's examine a just a couple of rune stones, relevant to our theme: "Disruption" and "Odin." The rune for disruption seems like an ancient statement of the laws of chaos -- disruption is where evolution comes from. Disruption is what heralds and brings about change and growth. Dynamic change is actually a more stable condition than the inertia of the status quo. Nature reveals this lesson to us daily, personally and in complex dynamic systems. Without disruption there is no change. "Odin," the blank rune, is NOTHING, and at the same time ALL. When you draw "Odin," you have essentially drawn all the runes and none of the runes. That blankness is the crucible of all and the matrix of creativity. This seems to relate to chaos, also. "Odin" and chaos are also qualitatively the same.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHAOS
At all levels -- personal, societal, and so-forth -- we come back to the idea that chaos/order reflects the same structure and problems. All the structures we are, have or experience are constantly in a balance between chaos and structure (order). Moving in and out of that, bathing in that chaos and emerging again, that is our re-creation. One of the main implications of that for our history as a species, as a culture, is that we are moving into a place of intense chaos in our political systems, our social systems, and our financial systems. In reality it always has been that way.
There isn't much new about the so-called New World Order. That is part of the point -- we are moving into a new order which is unpredictable since it is not logically thought out. It is really nothing new, but we have been enculturated to worship order (through the primary religion of science), and to fear or distrust chaos. Even anarchy doesn't have to imply lawlessness if each individual is consciously self-governing (autarchy).
The so-called "Aquarian Conspiracy," popularized by Marilyn Ferguson, can be seen as an introduction of social chaos to break up old forms of thought in an iconoclastic way to make way for rebirth on many levels. So, there is a message of hope for positive change even though things seem chaotic and are becoming more so. It is part of a larger order of evolution. There is going to be a quantum-shift and the new emergent structure hopefully is better.
If we trust nature and trust ourselves, we realize this is true. If we re-embraced chaos within our culture, like the old nature religions of ancient times, what qualities would it have? How would this new paradigm--chaos is okay, and even "good"--impact the individual? Another aspect of modern life is that with the population explosion there is naturally increasing stress. How do we learn to live with that? Behaviorists have shown that packing too many rats into a small area leads to increased competition, aggression, and unpredictability. Stress also leads to unpredictability in human behavior. We may need to find new, creative methods of decreasing population density so that stresses are held to a level where quality of life is still attainable. This may come through birth control, or territorial expansion into space, or combined with other solutions as-yet-unknown. But we had better take action.
This decade determines whether twice as many, or three times as many people inhabit the planet as it can sustain. Patriarchy suppressed the old chaos cultures, but the return of the Feminine to social importance may herald a new era of co-existence between chaos and order in our culture. The truth is we always have been a chaos culture, but in a state of extreme denial. We tend to see ourselves as ordered, responsible, reliable. This "control fantasy" probably springs from neurotic roots. It may feel safer, but is not necessarily true. Scientific notions of chaos may be difficult for some people to grasp, but not the notion of chaos pervading their daily life--we see it everywhere.
Lorenz tells us that an attractor contains an infinite complex of manifolds. It is a complex interaction of fields which forms the attractor and which forms the complex around the structure. It is not a "thing" at the center of a bunch of orbits. Rather, it is a complex infinity of interaction. Field interaction may be the strange attractor. This may be hard to understand -- but not the first-hand experience of chaos in our lives affecting our fixations, fascinations, attention, and intentions. Some of us think that science started out with things we could perceive and that it is getting further and further from things we can grasp with our senses.
The limits of our observation have been extended down to the void, and out into the far-reaches of the cosmos. As we got into quantum mechanics, physics no longer described our daily experience, so there is difficulty in understanding it, even for the experts. Understanding or comprehending laws or principles, doesn't really tell us what things are. Chaos doesn't imply a complexity beyond human understanding and everyday experience.
Because we all perceive the inherent chaos in our mortal lives, we understand it at a deeper level -- even more than quantum mechanics, relativity, or even Newtonian physics. We understand how chaos could be fundamental in reality. Chaos not only relates to the cosmic level of the physical universe and the subatomic world, its effects are obvious on the human levels of perception, experience, and understanding. We may not get the mathematics of chaos, but we get the gist of its fundamental role in our lives. No one can deny it exists! Chaos need not be part of the mystification of reality and nature by science. We understand it at a deep, personal, profound level. Physicist Joseph Ford has said that, "to accept the future we must renounce much of the past..."
This helps us move toward an evolutionary inclusion of chaos science into our worldview, displacing the outdated mechanistic-materialistic notions. This is not a petty rebellion against the established order, but a quantum leap in awareness which brings our concept of "I" and "Not-I" closer to reality. Everything is of one fabric, seamless and whole. Basically, this involves a "letting go" or "emptying" which frees one up to move into the future. We need to empty ourselves before we can be re-filled. Devolution (regression), revolution, and evolution are three different, related processes. We are not dealing with a revolution in science from chaos theory. The tone is evolutionary.
Chaos theory is not overthrowing any old notion, but extending and opening up what was formerly incomprehensible and often incompatible. Mandelbrot [who discovered them] has said that "nobody is indifferent to fractals," and that seems to be true. Because they are based on chaos, they are a deep expression of chaos. The surprise is that they are so beautiful. We see our own essence reflected in them, and they become expressions of ourselves. That is our relationship to fractals. Of course we are not indifferent to them because they reflect ourselves, and all we perceive around us. Their referent is the dynamics of our everyday life and the world about us.
We are in a constant battle to hold form and structure (survival) and keep chaos at bay (disintegration). Our bodies and mental processes are based on fractal anatomy or fractal architecture. There is an inherent fascination in that linking. Chaos is the foundation of health in the body, as well as creativity and flexibility. It is healthy to be chaotic sometimes, both mentally and physically. The healthy heart needs to go into that chaoticness and come back out again to remain healthy. We need to do the same with our mentality; it is how we learn and grow. In both the body and the mind dis-ease = too much order = being stuck.
Studies of pre-schoolers have shown that they thrive and learn better in a less-structured environment where they can be loud and enthusiastic without the characteristic repression of traditional school. This does not mean an environment that is devoid of structure, but one that minimizes repression and encourages exploration and challenges. Why do we fear chaos so much both in the world and within ourselves? In both religion and government there seems to be a mandate for control--to get away from chaos and cleave to law and order. Sometimes, there seems a certain sort of desperation in it, indicating acute fear over loss of control.
The compulsion to control generally arises from trauma in situations where we feel helpless and hopeless. We try to compensate by rigidly maintaining order in any domain which we can rule over. For example, a disgruntled housewife who was abused as a child may not be able to control her drinking husband or her wild children, but her house MUST remain immaculate at all times. Ernest Rossi, Jungian psychologist, has said that "chaos is often seen in terms of the limitations it implies, such as lack of predictability." We are afraid of that non-predictability. This is the fundamental basis of science which, in essence, functions as the prevailing religion of our times. We virtually all "believe" it. Both science and religion are heroic defenses against chaos.
We are afraid of chaos, and yet what a dull world it would be if everything was predictable. We would have dull relationships if we could totally predict one another. What a dull life if we could see our entire developmental progress predetermined and predictable; not to mention, knowing the hour of our death. We live in a world governed by deterministic laws. But reality also involves randomness, fluctuation, and irreversible processes. In terms of the human psyche, this bears directly on the concepts of choice and free will. There is a fairly direct flow from consciousness to action which involves perception, awareness, attention, free will, purpose, goals, intention, resolution, creativity, choice, and decision. All these lead us toward irrevocable action and perhaps the results of action: karma, or natural consequences.
Fractal images are new models of creative process. Chaos is really the seat of creativity -- the basis from which all of our creativity comes. Einstein would frequently daydream, letting his mind go into the state of chaos, and ultimately came the idea of relativity. Also, there was Newton sitting idly under the tree, and suddenly the apple falls on his head. From that incident he got his notion of gravity. Only small fluctuations in mental processes are required initially to amplify over time into major changes or re-visioning of reality.
Chaos doesn't have to be frightening. It can be very beautiful. It is where we create the new structure, the new order. We have been brainwashed out of that by both the religion of science and conventional religion, the patriarchal, left-brain approach to life. They are all defenses against that lifestyle that is in harmony with nature. It is the place of no thoughts, random neural firing patterns, the empty mind, or "beginner's mind." Another reason we fear chaos may be that essentially chaos equals death, i.e. death is a return to chaos.
Decay [entropy] is the process of becoming chaotic again. Structure decays into non-structure. It touches on our mortality issues. The return to death happens on many levels. If you simply watch your breathing you can notice a "little death" at the bottom of the breath. Each time we make a change in our thinking, we have the death of the old concept for a new idea. When we go into therapy, there is the death of parts of ourselves, part of our ego, so we can heal. There is no real need to be so afraid of either ego-death or physical death. It rarely changes the dynamics of the process.
Sleep equals dreams, and even sleep is a form of death, of going into chaos. This may be why we need to sleep. We become unconscious, we become blank, and our mind has no pattern. Then, out of that arise the dreams, which help us to heal. We move between the delta activity and rapid eye movement (REM), indicating dream activity. We are constantly moving into the structure of our dreams, which are healing and balancing, and then into the chaos of deeper sleep where there is no structure to the mind, and back again. This may be why dreams are so healing, since they are tied to that chaos. The same may be true of the healing power of sexual love, and the "little death" of orgasm.
THE QUALITATIVE vs. THE QUANTITATIVE
Throughout the centuries the rational mind has developed the language of mathematics as a way of conceptualizing order in the world. It is a way of approaching reality from a quantitative perspective. This ultimately lead to a society based in technology which is dehumanizing ("we are cogs in the great machine"). The qualitative aspect was secondary, so for centuries people hardly stopped to consider whether they liked their job or loved their spouse--it was just the way things were. Now quality of life and lifestyles are important issues for many people who are operating above the gross survival level, or merely existing.
Once again the bastions of science are crumbling in regard to this aspect of existence. Consider the statement of Sir James Jeans: The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms, out of which our individual minds have grown, exist as thoughts. And Arthur Eddington: I assert that the nature of all reality is spiritual, not material nor a dualism of matter and spirit. The hypothesis that its nature can be, to any degree, material does not enter into my reckoning, because as we now understand matter, the putting together of the adjective "material" and the noun "nature" does not make any sense.
Our quantitative consciousness came from the fact that we learned how to count. It worked well for everything from keeping count of herding animals to the rise and fall of rivers in ancient times. It fit a materialistic world, which functioned based on the concept of scarcity of goods, and an "I'll-get-mine-first" mentality. But the development of numbers and the ability to count may have been one of the most destructive things we have ever done in the development of our culture. Its value is paradoxical--both good and bad. It caused us to focus on quantity rather than quality. We have chaos and chaos always seems to go full circle into structure and through decay back into chaos. Coming into structure is the process of counting, its is a process of number, the process of ordering, the process of thinking, the process of manipulating nature until we reach a point of order. This is reflected in the consciousness model which begins with the universal collective consciousness, moving into increasing ego structure and body ego structure.
We hit a point of order and then we move into a process of decay. This is just a part of natural order, part of the karmic cycle, part of the consciousness style. Counting, numbering is a human invention. Numbers, even though they describe or symbolize universal dynamics are not fundamental in the cosmos. They are not archetypal in the Jungian sense, of existing apart from humanity.
Numbers, rather than BEING numbers, ARISE from archetypes, as ordering processes. In our model of the ego [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Swinney and Miller, 1991], they are the behavioral, thinking, emotional pattern side of the belief system, rather than on the deep imagery side. They are a function more of the intellect, emerging from the belief system. It has to do with the archetypal theme of the loss of innocence--the Garden of Eden story. Our belief is that numbers are a way of understanding or ordering reality. We started out in the Garden as beings of emotion, open to our intuition and extrasensory perceptions. In the Garden, we were basically in a state of chaos. "The Fall" implied the arrival of the age of intellect, mind, thinking, and language. And mathematics is simply a form of language, information transfer, which addresses its own structure.
Therefore, numbers are no more archetypal than letters or words. This doesn't mean they lack a mystical dimension--just ask a Qabalist. Numbers are a different way of expressing ideas--a different translation. Numbers are a function of the space/time continuum, not really a function of chaos itself, or an archetype itself. They are a function of our intellect. Zero and infinity are just different symbols for chaos. The two different faces of chaos that we see are really one and the same thing. They are non-ideas. You get infinity when you divide anything by zero. Zero is inherently a part of zero, one and the same thing. They are just ways of describing a chaotic thing you can't really grasp.
Jungian, Robin Robertson says, "we think the world is filled with matter and energy (with "stuff"), but it is equally filled with "structure," and that structure is dependent on emptiness, nothingness. Magician and mystic, Aleister Crowley reflected the same thought as "Infinite space is the goddess Nuit", who represents all and nothing., as primordial matrix. The truth is there is no end to infinity even though we try to quantify it.
ABSTRACT: Experiential therapy sessions have shown that as consciousness journeys deeper and deeper into the psyche, it eventually encounters a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. Those emerging from this non-ordinary state of consciousness report an increased sense of well-being ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. We known that research has shown that imagery can affect the immune system. Imagery journeys in the autonomous stream of consciousness may activate psychosomatic healing forces, such as the placebo effect.
Science thus brings us to the threshold of the ego and there leaves us to ourselves. --Max Plank
...the attractor does not consist of a simple point, curve or higher dimensional manifold, but contains an infinite complex of manifolds. --Edward Lorenz
CHAOS IN DAILY LIFE
Both the shamanic view and modern depth psychology embrace an integrated view of psyche, soul, and nature. Sometimes this worldview is easier to achieve as an abstract thought than as an on-going perspective about life itself. Try as we might, we are so ingrained with the old mechanical-materialistic fantasy that we find our thoughts and attitudes slipping back toward causal models, perpetually denying the true nature of reality as we experience it. We have been conditioned since birth towards a conformist, orderly behavior that is deemed good for society, but is the death-knell of individuality. Much of the distortion in our worldview comes from our outmoded view of who we are, in terms of consciousness, awareness and perception.
Consensus reality doesn't represent any universal truth -- so-called "normal" consciousness is more of a cultural trance state (Tart, 1992). Integrating the new science of chaos theory can help us expand our understanding of reality. It impacts our sense of self as well as our concept of "how things work" in the universe. Allowing chaos back into our lives in a positive way also fosters the healing process. We have observed in experiential therapy that clients naturally gravitate in their inner journeys to a de-structured place. While there, they report feelings of rejuvenation and well-being. There are certain primary characteristics of chaos and chaotic systems (complex dynamic systems):
CHAOS IS:
1) deterministic
2) paradoxical
3) self-generative
4) self-iterating
5) self-organizing
6) intrinsically unpredictable
7) yet boundaried
8) and geometric
9) and sustained by complex feedback loops
CHAOTIC SYSTEMS ARE:
1) sensitive to initial conditions
2) disproportionately responsive to stimuli
3) translatable from micro- to macroscopic proportions
4) attractor centered
5) shuffled time/space
6) apparently acausal (actually enfolded; implicate/explicate)
7) qualitative
8) global phenomena
9) flexible/creative Each of these aspects can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife. In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. We have observed many dream journeys to which these descriptors could apply.
For example, the quality of shuffled time/space is seen in the precognitive or prophetic dream. An attractor-centered dream might focus around a specific psychological complex, which acts like a magnetic center [strange attractor] for emotional conflict. Chaotic systems are also complex, as are dreams. They represent systems that are far-from-equilibrium. Jung contended that dreams help maintain psychic balance.
The scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality as presently understood. Old psychological models have placed emphasis on order, and the overcoming of chaos. Yet chaos has a perhaps unrecognized value, in our psyche and physiology. Just as a healthy heart sometime goes into a chaotic pattern, turbulence and chaos help us break down old, outmoded structures in personality.
Even the deterioration of mental illness is quite purposeful in that it is the individual's attempt at healing and finding a new emergent order. Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities. It has been said that "any supreme insight is a metaphor." It has also been said that "the better the idea, the more likely it is to have been extremely vague." While this may not hold true in all cases, it is true that there is a certain quality of ambiguity in chaos and chaos consciousness which must simply be tolerated.
For example, this description of imaginative consciousness and "turbulence" from artist Naum Gabo in OF DIVERS ARTS: The artist's mind is a turbulent sea full of all kinds of impressions, responses and experiences as well as feelings and emotions. Some experts on art assert that the artist does not really have more of these emotions and feelings and impressions than the ordinary man who is not an artist. This may be true or false, but what they apparently fail to see and assert is that in the artist these feelings and responses are in a more agitated state. He is more concerned with them, and the urge to express these experiences is more intense in him than it is in the ordinary man. And that, I suppose, is the reason why the artist's mind is not only more turbulent but sometimes, alas, troublesome also...
The chaos of our human lives is re-iterated from the subatomic through the cosmic level. Chaos is the matrix of creation. It provides a bridge for unfolding "heaven on earth", a means of manifesting and grounding spiritual energy, that is not only creative but healing. A state-of-the-art empirical foundation is essential for any well-grounded philosophy of life and a realistic self-concept. We create limited subjective fantasies about ourselves and the nature of the universe all the time. Usually we do not examine our a priori beliefs which condition those notions. We grasp our beliefs as though they were the most precious of gemstones, rather than just models or constructs. The true nature of perception dictates that we experience only a simulation of ourselves and the world-at-large (Tart, 1992).
From our worldview come symbols and images which a small part of our brain, and an even smaller part of our mind and consciousness clings to, attempting to structure reality out of chaos. By clutching these beliefs, we then limit our experience of reality to that defined by them. For the most part, these underlying beliefs are rooted in notions about the nature of reality which are derived from 17th century physics and philosophy. The old mechanistic view asserts that mind and matter are separate. Newton's discoveries bolstered the notion that reality is a universe consisting of separate objects interacting with one another according to fixed laws of cause and effect. The laws are learned through objective observation and measurement. Causal laws fit with our direct experience of the universe and are therefore supported as feeling "right" by intuition.
Einstein said our language requires coordinates. Since we live in a culture which is mostly based on this science and its technology, we generally accept these notions as a given, as axioms too basic to be questioned. We may know about the irrational, counter-intuitive concepts of quantum mechanics, yet it hardly seems to affect us. Our beliefs are still largely rooted in cause-and-effect. From these axioms we also construct our ego and personality which is a collection of secondary beliefs about what we are and how we can relate to and control our surroundings. It seems to work.
Using this system of thought and belief, we are able to control much of the physical world around us. That is, until catastrophic chaos intervenes in our lives. It may come in the form of natural disaster, random victimization, the bifurcation of a love triangle [paramour as strange attractor], or a crisis in transition from one phase of life to another. Sometimes the intrusion is a spontaneous unusual psychic or spiritual experience which can neither be integrated nor assimilated into daily life. It also will not be ignored. It may come, therefore, in the form of a recurrent dream, or other means of hailing the conscious mind from the subconscious.
Spiritual emergencies, ranging from addiction to near-death-experiences, call for a breaking down of the old system to the primal or fundamental (or chaotic) level. Disintegration is the direction of these processes, which create opportunities for us to "get it back together' at a healthier, more enriched, enlarged level, with a new primal self-image. As powerful as the scientific approach seems to be, it leaves many phenomena unexplained. There are strategic holes in the fortress of classical scientific doctrine. For example, objective observation and the principles of cause and effect.
In 1938 Einstein wrote, "Physical concepts are free creatures of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." Quantum mechanics further attacks the principles of objectivity and separativity. The implications of this theory take us into a strange reality in which we not only influence reality but actually create it from our minds and expectations. Realities exist as possibilities which come into being through our consciousness and intentionality.
To put it in other terms, apparently the universe exists only within the context of our relationship to it. John Wheeler, a physicist from Princeton University, writes, "May the universe be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate?...The vital act is the act of participation. 'Participator' is the given incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term 'observer' of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says."
Henry Pierce Strapp, another quantum physicist, states that the world is "Not a structure built out of existing analyzable entities, but rather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationship to the whole."
In the field of medical science, there are many cases of healing which conventional or classical medicine or psychology cannot explain. These gaps have been labeled placebo and spontaneous remission. Yet, this does no more than hide our ignorance behind words. There is, however, a striking parallel between healing and the new physics. As in the new physics, healing too occurs in a realm of connectivity and mutual creation. Healer and "healee" are not separate objective entities following fixed laws with the former manipulating the physical components of the latter. They are partners in a process of creating a universe in which mind and body are no longer separate. They establish a flow in harmonious accord with each other and the rest of creation, a state of ease rather than dis-ease.
The emergent healing paradigm helps us evolve out of the body/mind or nature/spirit split instilled by our culture during the era of mechanistic science and the industrial revolution. We now live in an information society. Information theory describes the fundamental quality of information as an agent of change. Great minds have been moving in these systems-theory directions for some time, but there seems to be a lag-time in the psyche of the general population. Even though some may comprehend it mentally, it rarely transforms into a truly transformative, deep knowledge on all levels of awareness, much less what it could mean in terms of mental health.
Chaos theory gives us a visual mathematical language for charting strange attractors in dynamical systems. They can be applied within an individual psyche or to interactive relationships. This technology has already been applied to human behavior. Order and chaos in the emotional realm have been studied by mathematicians and psychiatrists. Their studies produced models of a person's chaotic or unstable behavior in comparison to their stable behavior. Stable behavior can be imagined as being like the sky, unstable behavior like mountains, with little pockets or "caves" of serenity within them. These little sanctuaries could be fostered through therapy. Stability can be increased through therapy within a broader landscape of chaos and pathology. It may also lead to new ways to individualize psychotherapy, like dreamhealing. [see DREAMHEALING: THE HEART OF DREAMS, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Even mental illness may relate to the phenomena of strange attractors in the brain or emotional field. Some researchers believe, for example, that a number of mental disorders, such as manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia, occur when biological regulatory systems cease to operate at their normal, fixed point and change suddenly to another stable but abnormal point. In chaos theory, when an attractor disappears due to sudden catastrophic change, the system becomes structureless and experiences a term of "transient chaos" before another attractor is found.
The primal image is the attractor and it forms based on the organism's interaction with the "Not-I" or environment. An individual's personal myth or my theme might be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor. In another phase of life, the focus could change to others. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion. The ego can suffer greatly from this jerking around by the deep forces within, especially if it doesn't have enough information about its purpose to derive meaning from the experience. For some, the disruption leads to a nervous breakdown or psychotic break, while for others it opens the doors into a new freedom and expanded sense of self.
Chaos is part of a greater structure/process, for want of a better title, called evolution. Order emerges spontaneously from chaos, and order tends to degenerate into chaos when forms are obsolete. Chaos is also the root of the creative process. In chaos, the search for information is open. As soon as you think you "know" something, you close down the search for new information and solutions. There are many questions which arise within the model of human development based on chaos theory.
We can conjecture why certain attractors or complexes form. We really don't know why some may become prominent and others fade into the background. But we do know that when two or more are competing for divergent behavior and attitudes, the resulting psychic split can be painful, setting up a deep conflict which is not be easy to resolve. If it is extreme, it leads to psychological fragmentation. Free choice may be a factor, but our choices are limited by our attitudes about what we believe is possible for us. The only solution is to dive to the deepest levels, seeking evolutionary transformation -- a quantum leap in consciousness that can contain opposites within paradox. The first step in understanding how these attractors affect us has to do with our personal filters, our distorted experiences of raw archetypal energy.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHAOS
In our studies of healing, and an attempt to synthesize them into a consistent ideal, we have developed a model. Consciousness may be viewed as a field interacting with other fields. In physics, a field is a medium of connectivity, an extent of space within which lines of force (magnetic and electrical) are in operation. It is also called a field of force. When two fields, like electricity and magnetism, interact they create electromagnetic waves which include all forms of radiant energy from light and radio waves, to gamma and cosmic rays.
Electromagnetism is magnetism developed by electricity. EM fields interact with the smallest units of matter energetically exciting the components of the fundamental geometry of space in fields which are in a constant state of fluctuation. The consciousness field is not limited to the conscious awareness of human beings, as in the Jungian concept. Rather, it is the creative dynamic matrix behind all life and inorganic manifestation. It is self-generating. Consciousness begets consciousness. It is self-iterating (or repeating--chronic), and self-organizing. When consciousness interacts with the space/time field or electromagnetic (EM) fields, then individual consciousness emerges.
Since the consciousness field represents all potential, its qualitative nature must be paradoxical for it encompasses the opposites. Still, once it begins interacting with other fields and begins to "make psyche matter," certain boundary conditions are imposed. The determinism of a chaotic system guides the growth and maturation process. The original site interaction of consciousness with time/space creates not only the material basis, but the organism's strange attractor, which we refer to as the "primal image." It is the blueprint of the entity. Jungian psychologists are exploring the possible relationships between strange attractors and archetypes or complexes [see PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES].
In our view these attractors or complexes are secondary formations, even though the concept of a primal guiding image shares much with the Jungian concept of self. They are merely similar. This view is neither archetypal nor complex-oriented. Rather than limiting exploration piecemeal to a few select archetypes or specific complexes, it approaches the individual as a whole, not as a collection of fragmented parts. Human beings reflect the qualities of chaotic systems. As living creatures we are sensitive to the initial conditions of our genetics and conception.
We can easily respond disproportionately to stimuli. A child's actual brain chemistry and neural patterns can be changed by childhood trauma. This creates a rigid structure through the process of conditioning. The trauma may come from an insignificant incident such as parents yelling, for the child perceives them as gigantic, all-mighty gods essential for survival. Needless to say, severe trauma inflicts an even deeper imprint or distortion of the personality. Seeds of change (for good or bad) planted in our lives can quickly grow later to transformations of vast proportion.
For example, any choice point we face in life where we leave an alternate "road not taken," leads to a wide variety of different life experiences and opportunities. We are attractor-centered, whether we conceive of that primal attractor as divinity, the higher self, the core self, the Jungian self, the Gestalt self, or that deepest sense of self--our primal self image (including its unconscious aspects). As an attractor, it contains an infinite complex of forms and images. Elsewhere, we have delved into this more deeply [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Miller and Swinney, 1991].
Our consciousness is capable of experiencing shuffled space/time. It happens during dreams, deja-vu, precognition, and other psychic experiences. We also experience apparently acausal phenomena, termed synchronicity by Jung. Physicist David Bohm calls enfolded information "implicate" when it is enfolded in a latent state of potential. It is called "explicate" when it is unfolded or actualized (observable). Our entire lives are encoded in the initial moment of conception, yet the details of that unfolding potential are inherently unpredictable. Our lives are the explication of the initial conditions present at conception. That initial blueprint is subject to many perturbations along the way.
Chaotic systems are qualitative. Even physics proves it is impossible for us to comprehend anything but subjective perceptions. When it comes to human life, quality is generally valued over quantity faced with impairment. We adapt to changing circumstances in our environment because we are flexible and creative. Because of this we have covered the globe with civilization. Our physical bodies and our societies are sustained by complex feedback loops. Our moods are controlled by excititory and inhibitory brain hormones. The political process is part of the social feedback system. The consciousness field is that which relates us to the entire universe. It may be viewed as chaos, or energy in a primal chaotic state, prior to any solidification into matter. It is a field of energy, not a "thing." It is able to take on infinite forms, including images.
Time is also a field. Consciousness may intersect with time at a 90 degree angle, in which case a linear flow seems to emerge. Or, it may fold over in a contiguous way, producing a "bending" or folding of space. In far-from-equilibrium conditions, this folding or kneading would create layers of time/space that are simply connected, like pieces of layered pastry dough. Points in time widely separated in the linear sense, become intimately juxtaposed. In this model, consciousness would have the ability to "pop" around in time. The site interaction with other fields by consciousness is what we view as the intrusion of the strange attractor. Where two fields interact, that is the strange attractor, which then attracts and forms the consciousness around it.
The other field, whatever it is interacting with, attracts the energy around it too. And this is what we create our experience from. The strange attractor is the intersection of the fields. We can view it linearly, or in non-linear fashion. This is speculation, on the touching of fields creating reality at a profound level. When consciousness intersects with other fields it seems to create matter, or the illusion of matter, and we can manipulate that, change forms, etc. Consciousness evolution equals the process of chaos moving into structure, dissolving back into chaos, and reconstituting into structure. It requires a breaking up or dissolving of old forms back into the primal state.
For some reason in dreamhealing sessions, each new structure that comes out of the primal chaos seems to be an evolution beyond, or a superior structure, or a better structure than the previous one that went into the chaos. Now we don't know why this should be, but it does seem to be that way consistently. We can speculate that this generalizes to the whole process of evolution. In any event, it has been observed specifically in dream journeys which move deep into the psyche. Of course, it pre-supposes that the journey gets to the depth where chaotic consciousness is experienced to begin with. Whenever we begin with a structure (the currently defined personality), we commit it back to the chaos (the primal chaotic state of consciousness).
The new structure, the new image that emerges is always better, always more healed, more whole, evolved beyond the old structure that was so limiting. Rigidities seem to dissolve and reform in that state of consciousness, like a modern equivalent of the old alchemical maxim--"solve et coagula." This may relate to a deeper, unknown law of chaos. What is known is that we observe it repeatedly in the dreamhealing process. If you take any portion of a fractal and expand it, you find it is self-similar. This reveals a harmony with shamanic law--that organization repeats itself at all levels of organization. Patterns repeat at all levels of organization. It is much like finding the universe in a grain of sand. Evolution in consciousness comes with a quantum shift in awareness. That quantum shift occurs during the period in which the evolving structure is in chaos.
So if you are in a dreamhealing process, experiencing for example, the multiple consciousness of the Earth Mother as decay, you may follow that to the point of total disintegration. Since you are identified with that state of consciousness at the time, your personal awareness dives down into the chaos, journeying to the most fundamental or primal state of consciousness--chaos. That is when the shift in primal image of self becomes possible, because it is totally de-structured. During that period of chaos is when it (and you with it) are changed from this to that, in a non-linear state.
From that, you can see that you can consign your bound-up rigid energies (whether it is fear, pain, or whatever) to their primal state so that the transformation of that energy frees it to take on a new quality. Again, this is an alchemical notion: "Only that which has been separated can be properly joined." Consciousness healing takes place in quantum shifts. The old model of psychological integration changed and integrated a little piece at a time, building toward a "strong coping ego." The personal experience of the quantum shift is in the imagery of dreams and dream journeys. It appears spontaneously.
For example, here is how one client described the journey to the inner healer in a self-guided session: First the dream: I am in a sunny field of green grass. I see an old college friend coming toward me across the field. His name is Mark. I'm also trying to set up a screen to watch a movie on. The screen is two pieces of painted green wood. With the dream in my mind, I choose to become the dream. I am the field of grass. I notice how close to the earth I am, indeed, how I am the earth. I feel an aliveness as grass that I have forgotten as myself. I take in the sunlight to nourish me. I feel drawn into the roots of the grass. I have a sense of the rootedness of the grass, so I let myself go into the earth through the roots. This leads me into a series of colors and textures which I discover as the journey continues underground. I let myself go on, and I arrive eventually at the center of the earth, where a vibrant orange lava surrounds me and penetrates me with its heat. With this main sensation in my body, I find myself settling into the flow and resting, taking in the heat all around me. The journey has come to a momentary ending, but the ending brings movement and flow into my awareness. I have found a place of transformational energy. From the bright green field, I've come to rest in a warm, embracing lava-energy deep inside me. I have contacted the inner healer, the healing state of my dream.
The real healing IS this quantum shift in mental, emotional, even physical structure. The approach is one of wholeness and following the image.
The dreamhealing process is aimed at addressing this very profound level from the beginning. Progress comes unpredictably in quantum leaps in consciousness. Carl Simonton's work using imagery with cancer patients touches on this. The use of imagery with the intent of bringing about healing seems to mobilize forces deep within us that were formerly unaccessible. Nature as structure is reflected at all levels of organization just like fractal math shows.
If you look at a tiny piece of a fractal, the whole structure is reflected within it, much like a hologram. This is because it is self-similar and self-iterative. Any tiny piece reflects the whole. It is much the same in holography where a tiny piece of the negative can produce the whole image, though the detail may be fuzzier. This happens in human systems also. Applying Transactional Analysis to corporations shows that if you look at the pathology of the organization, it is related to the pathology of the individuals within that organization--and very often most to the founder or director. And vice versa.
We re-encounter the "holographic notion" in shamanism. The worldview is that we are reflections of the great Mother Earth. What happens to us is reflected in Gaea in the rocks and the trees, etc. At any level of organization nature repeats herself. As you watch the cycles of nature, you observe that things go into life and death and rebirth, as energy changes form. If that is happening all around you, what is to make you think you are any different than that. You are part of nature, unlike in the "civilized" or "scientific" views which set us apart. If you are truly not separate, you can expect, quite naturally, to go through the same cycle yourself, in consciousness as well as in biology. Further, you can trust that and embrace that flow of life, death, and rebirth.
Mystics and scientists show us that "change is stability. This is very much part of the shamanic perspective. We find that, in therapy, people get into "earth consciousness" and they perceive that they are healing the earth as well as themselves. This idea may be subjective, but not necessarily grandiose or delusional. It is unusual and perhaps unpredictable from their presenting problem. For example, in one experience a woman became a throbbing like the heartbeat of the entire planet. She felt the healing within herself as that of the planet. From the shaman's perspective, the healing of any component contributes to the healing of the whole, though it may be difficult to substantiate for the rational mind. To some extent this view becomes less subjective if we look at fractal theory in which any change in a part also changes the whole.
As further evidence of dream's chaotic nature, a case can be made that dreams are holograms. In using dream symbols for healing work, it seems that "all roads lead to Rome." A person can enter the dream through any of the symbolic doorways and derive a very different experience of consciousness along the way. Still, following the symbols deeper and deeper one arrives at that healing, primal level. As long as the image is followed back faithfully, the connection can be made from any beginning point in any dream, old or new. That is one reason we never need to go back to a particular dream symbol that has not been worked, but can pick up the process entering through a fresh dream image.
The deeper mind always presents the best departure point for current conflicts and turmoil, that which seeks healing. The part is contained within the whole, but the whole is also contained in each part, according to the holographic model of reality. Therefore, by changing the part, therapy changes the whole. So philosophically, it makes sense to approach the whole person, rather than the part which contains less-detailed information. If the therapist chooses the part to work on, it is limited. Psyche has many options to choose from its deeper wisdom. Small changes in therapy can translate into exponential changes over time, since chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions. They quickly pump up small changes to larger changes in awareness. Part of the overall healing model is that WE ARE NOT SEPARATE. And, to the extent that we can embrace that model, it becomes more of a reality in the most profound sense.
CHANGE IS STABILITY
The difference between inanimate and animate life (or consciousness) is only a reflection of the interaction of the conscious field with the time field, or based on the level of observation. Inert matter is alive with subatomic activity. If you look closely enough, or remove the time-bound aspects, the similarity is there. Inanimate objects have a capacity to reconstitute just as organic systems do. Any definition of the difference between animate and inanimate existence is time-bound within a given period of time. Because of the conservation of energy, our constituents will participate in many animate and inanimate processes over the aeons.
For example, all the elements within our bodies were cooked in the crucible of some ancient star, which exploded in a supernova millennia ago. When you remove the dimension of time, the definitions "star" and "human" do not hold. We share the same essence. Maybe this is why mystic/magician Aleister Crowley said "Every man and every woman is a star." The similarity of archetypes (pervasive patterns which seem to repeat in nature and the psyche) may be a function of genetic structure.
Genetics provides a sense of universality amongst all humankind of senses and experiences of structure. Jung proposed a psychoid nature, (beyond and independent of human experiences), for archetypes. In the deepest sense, these archetypal energies are trans-human, transpersonal. Nevertheless, out of chaotic systems, we see self-similar, though not identical, patterns emerging. This is a property of chaotic systems. Our perceptions of these forms, our sensory patterns, may simply create archetypes out of them. There is that deeper structure of forms that arises spontaneously from chaos.
The limitations of our perceptions and senses, based on genetics, conditions what "archetypes" we tend to perceive and live out. Perhaps Jung mistook human perception of archetypes for those being "common" archetypes; whereas chaos may not be bound to that. A tree, for example, has the ability to experience its existence in its own way, at least from the shamanic perspective of animism. We can speculate about trees, or rocks, or fish with their different perceptual apparatus. They naturally will experience different perceptions of so-called archetypes based on their forms of "perception." They may also "notice" and create archetypes of their own out of persistent patterns. But, these will be very different from the kind of perceptions our intellect and genetic organs are capable of focusing on. Therefore, an archetype may be a function of genetic commonality.
Strange attractors in this view are based on the genetic structure that attracts the conscious energy around it. Out of chaotic systems we see self-similar patterns emerging. Our perceptions create archetypes by adding words and concepts. When it comes to creating a human being, one of the first things that is created out of that consciousness field interaction with EM fields, gravity and time, is the genetic structure which is the blueprint around which our physical structure evolves [see EMBRYONIC HOLOGRAPHY, Miller and Webb, 1973].
Our physical structure, as dictated by DNA, in turn determines emotional structure, sensory structure, and perceptual structure. Our sensory apparatus arises out of the genetic structure. The strange attractor is that touching of fields which then forms the physical and psychic structure. The relationships of our physical and emotional structure come out of their interaction, that interface, or nexus point.
Chaos may also be related to certain forms of divination, based on so-called chance, such as the I Ching, Tarot, or the Rune Stones. Divinatory procedures help us extract personal meaning from the chaotic jumble of divinatory elements. They mirror our subconscious and environment at that specific moment of observation. The structure of divinatory instruments also reveals much about the nature of the human psyche. There may be an infinite number of archetypes in the universe, but a select number are most influential in the lives of humanity. These are what get encoded into our divinatory systems as most relevant.
For example, let's examine a just a couple of rune stones, relevant to our theme: "Disruption" and "Odin." The rune for disruption seems like an ancient statement of the laws of chaos -- disruption is where evolution comes from. Disruption is what heralds and brings about change and growth. Dynamic change is actually a more stable condition than the inertia of the status quo. Nature reveals this lesson to us daily, personally and in complex dynamic systems. Without disruption there is no change. "Odin," the blank rune, is NOTHING, and at the same time ALL. When you draw "Odin," you have essentially drawn all the runes and none of the runes. That blankness is the crucible of all and the matrix of creativity. This seems to relate to chaos, also. "Odin" and chaos are also qualitatively the same.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHAOS
At all levels -- personal, societal, and so-forth -- we come back to the idea that chaos/order reflects the same structure and problems. All the structures we are, have or experience are constantly in a balance between chaos and structure (order). Moving in and out of that, bathing in that chaos and emerging again, that is our re-creation. One of the main implications of that for our history as a species, as a culture, is that we are moving into a place of intense chaos in our political systems, our social systems, and our financial systems. In reality it always has been that way.
There isn't much new about the so-called New World Order. That is part of the point -- we are moving into a new order which is unpredictable since it is not logically thought out. It is really nothing new, but we have been enculturated to worship order (through the primary religion of science), and to fear or distrust chaos. Even anarchy doesn't have to imply lawlessness if each individual is consciously self-governing (autarchy).
The so-called "Aquarian Conspiracy," popularized by Marilyn Ferguson, can be seen as an introduction of social chaos to break up old forms of thought in an iconoclastic way to make way for rebirth on many levels. So, there is a message of hope for positive change even though things seem chaotic and are becoming more so. It is part of a larger order of evolution. There is going to be a quantum-shift and the new emergent structure hopefully is better.
If we trust nature and trust ourselves, we realize this is true. If we re-embraced chaos within our culture, like the old nature religions of ancient times, what qualities would it have? How would this new paradigm--chaos is okay, and even "good"--impact the individual? Another aspect of modern life is that with the population explosion there is naturally increasing stress. How do we learn to live with that? Behaviorists have shown that packing too many rats into a small area leads to increased competition, aggression, and unpredictability. Stress also leads to unpredictability in human behavior. We may need to find new, creative methods of decreasing population density so that stresses are held to a level where quality of life is still attainable. This may come through birth control, or territorial expansion into space, or combined with other solutions as-yet-unknown. But we had better take action.
This decade determines whether twice as many, or three times as many people inhabit the planet as it can sustain. Patriarchy suppressed the old chaos cultures, but the return of the Feminine to social importance may herald a new era of co-existence between chaos and order in our culture. The truth is we always have been a chaos culture, but in a state of extreme denial. We tend to see ourselves as ordered, responsible, reliable. This "control fantasy" probably springs from neurotic roots. It may feel safer, but is not necessarily true. Scientific notions of chaos may be difficult for some people to grasp, but not the notion of chaos pervading their daily life--we see it everywhere.
Lorenz tells us that an attractor contains an infinite complex of manifolds. It is a complex interaction of fields which forms the attractor and which forms the complex around the structure. It is not a "thing" at the center of a bunch of orbits. Rather, it is a complex infinity of interaction. Field interaction may be the strange attractor. This may be hard to understand -- but not the first-hand experience of chaos in our lives affecting our fixations, fascinations, attention, and intentions. Some of us think that science started out with things we could perceive and that it is getting further and further from things we can grasp with our senses.
The limits of our observation have been extended down to the void, and out into the far-reaches of the cosmos. As we got into quantum mechanics, physics no longer described our daily experience, so there is difficulty in understanding it, even for the experts. Understanding or comprehending laws or principles, doesn't really tell us what things are. Chaos doesn't imply a complexity beyond human understanding and everyday experience.
Because we all perceive the inherent chaos in our mortal lives, we understand it at a deeper level -- even more than quantum mechanics, relativity, or even Newtonian physics. We understand how chaos could be fundamental in reality. Chaos not only relates to the cosmic level of the physical universe and the subatomic world, its effects are obvious on the human levels of perception, experience, and understanding. We may not get the mathematics of chaos, but we get the gist of its fundamental role in our lives. No one can deny it exists! Chaos need not be part of the mystification of reality and nature by science. We understand it at a deep, personal, profound level. Physicist Joseph Ford has said that, "to accept the future we must renounce much of the past..."
This helps us move toward an evolutionary inclusion of chaos science into our worldview, displacing the outdated mechanistic-materialistic notions. This is not a petty rebellion against the established order, but a quantum leap in awareness which brings our concept of "I" and "Not-I" closer to reality. Everything is of one fabric, seamless and whole. Basically, this involves a "letting go" or "emptying" which frees one up to move into the future. We need to empty ourselves before we can be re-filled. Devolution (regression), revolution, and evolution are three different, related processes. We are not dealing with a revolution in science from chaos theory. The tone is evolutionary.
Chaos theory is not overthrowing any old notion, but extending and opening up what was formerly incomprehensible and often incompatible. Mandelbrot [who discovered them] has said that "nobody is indifferent to fractals," and that seems to be true. Because they are based on chaos, they are a deep expression of chaos. The surprise is that they are so beautiful. We see our own essence reflected in them, and they become expressions of ourselves. That is our relationship to fractals. Of course we are not indifferent to them because they reflect ourselves, and all we perceive around us. Their referent is the dynamics of our everyday life and the world about us.
We are in a constant battle to hold form and structure (survival) and keep chaos at bay (disintegration). Our bodies and mental processes are based on fractal anatomy or fractal architecture. There is an inherent fascination in that linking. Chaos is the foundation of health in the body, as well as creativity and flexibility. It is healthy to be chaotic sometimes, both mentally and physically. The healthy heart needs to go into that chaoticness and come back out again to remain healthy. We need to do the same with our mentality; it is how we learn and grow. In both the body and the mind dis-ease = too much order = being stuck.
Studies of pre-schoolers have shown that they thrive and learn better in a less-structured environment where they can be loud and enthusiastic without the characteristic repression of traditional school. This does not mean an environment that is devoid of structure, but one that minimizes repression and encourages exploration and challenges. Why do we fear chaos so much both in the world and within ourselves? In both religion and government there seems to be a mandate for control--to get away from chaos and cleave to law and order. Sometimes, there seems a certain sort of desperation in it, indicating acute fear over loss of control.
The compulsion to control generally arises from trauma in situations where we feel helpless and hopeless. We try to compensate by rigidly maintaining order in any domain which we can rule over. For example, a disgruntled housewife who was abused as a child may not be able to control her drinking husband or her wild children, but her house MUST remain immaculate at all times. Ernest Rossi, Jungian psychologist, has said that "chaos is often seen in terms of the limitations it implies, such as lack of predictability." We are afraid of that non-predictability. This is the fundamental basis of science which, in essence, functions as the prevailing religion of our times. We virtually all "believe" it. Both science and religion are heroic defenses against chaos.
We are afraid of chaos, and yet what a dull world it would be if everything was predictable. We would have dull relationships if we could totally predict one another. What a dull life if we could see our entire developmental progress predetermined and predictable; not to mention, knowing the hour of our death. We live in a world governed by deterministic laws. But reality also involves randomness, fluctuation, and irreversible processes. In terms of the human psyche, this bears directly on the concepts of choice and free will. There is a fairly direct flow from consciousness to action which involves perception, awareness, attention, free will, purpose, goals, intention, resolution, creativity, choice, and decision. All these lead us toward irrevocable action and perhaps the results of action: karma, or natural consequences.
Fractal images are new models of creative process. Chaos is really the seat of creativity -- the basis from which all of our creativity comes. Einstein would frequently daydream, letting his mind go into the state of chaos, and ultimately came the idea of relativity. Also, there was Newton sitting idly under the tree, and suddenly the apple falls on his head. From that incident he got his notion of gravity. Only small fluctuations in mental processes are required initially to amplify over time into major changes or re-visioning of reality.
Chaos doesn't have to be frightening. It can be very beautiful. It is where we create the new structure, the new order. We have been brainwashed out of that by both the religion of science and conventional religion, the patriarchal, left-brain approach to life. They are all defenses against that lifestyle that is in harmony with nature. It is the place of no thoughts, random neural firing patterns, the empty mind, or "beginner's mind." Another reason we fear chaos may be that essentially chaos equals death, i.e. death is a return to chaos.
Decay [entropy] is the process of becoming chaotic again. Structure decays into non-structure. It touches on our mortality issues. The return to death happens on many levels. If you simply watch your breathing you can notice a "little death" at the bottom of the breath. Each time we make a change in our thinking, we have the death of the old concept for a new idea. When we go into therapy, there is the death of parts of ourselves, part of our ego, so we can heal. There is no real need to be so afraid of either ego-death or physical death. It rarely changes the dynamics of the process.
Sleep equals dreams, and even sleep is a form of death, of going into chaos. This may be why we need to sleep. We become unconscious, we become blank, and our mind has no pattern. Then, out of that arise the dreams, which help us to heal. We move between the delta activity and rapid eye movement (REM), indicating dream activity. We are constantly moving into the structure of our dreams, which are healing and balancing, and then into the chaos of deeper sleep where there is no structure to the mind, and back again. This may be why dreams are so healing, since they are tied to that chaos. The same may be true of the healing power of sexual love, and the "little death" of orgasm.
THE QUALITATIVE vs. THE QUANTITATIVE
Throughout the centuries the rational mind has developed the language of mathematics as a way of conceptualizing order in the world. It is a way of approaching reality from a quantitative perspective. This ultimately lead to a society based in technology which is dehumanizing ("we are cogs in the great machine"). The qualitative aspect was secondary, so for centuries people hardly stopped to consider whether they liked their job or loved their spouse--it was just the way things were. Now quality of life and lifestyles are important issues for many people who are operating above the gross survival level, or merely existing.
Once again the bastions of science are crumbling in regard to this aspect of existence. Consider the statement of Sir James Jeans: The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms, out of which our individual minds have grown, exist as thoughts. And Arthur Eddington: I assert that the nature of all reality is spiritual, not material nor a dualism of matter and spirit. The hypothesis that its nature can be, to any degree, material does not enter into my reckoning, because as we now understand matter, the putting together of the adjective "material" and the noun "nature" does not make any sense.
Our quantitative consciousness came from the fact that we learned how to count. It worked well for everything from keeping count of herding animals to the rise and fall of rivers in ancient times. It fit a materialistic world, which functioned based on the concept of scarcity of goods, and an "I'll-get-mine-first" mentality. But the development of numbers and the ability to count may have been one of the most destructive things we have ever done in the development of our culture. Its value is paradoxical--both good and bad. It caused us to focus on quantity rather than quality. We have chaos and chaos always seems to go full circle into structure and through decay back into chaos. Coming into structure is the process of counting, its is a process of number, the process of ordering, the process of thinking, the process of manipulating nature until we reach a point of order. This is reflected in the consciousness model which begins with the universal collective consciousness, moving into increasing ego structure and body ego structure.
We hit a point of order and then we move into a process of decay. This is just a part of natural order, part of the karmic cycle, part of the consciousness style. Counting, numbering is a human invention. Numbers, even though they describe or symbolize universal dynamics are not fundamental in the cosmos. They are not archetypal in the Jungian sense, of existing apart from humanity.
Numbers, rather than BEING numbers, ARISE from archetypes, as ordering processes. In our model of the ego [see EGO AND THE PROCESS OF HEALING, Swinney and Miller, 1991], they are the behavioral, thinking, emotional pattern side of the belief system, rather than on the deep imagery side. They are a function more of the intellect, emerging from the belief system. It has to do with the archetypal theme of the loss of innocence--the Garden of Eden story. Our belief is that numbers are a way of understanding or ordering reality. We started out in the Garden as beings of emotion, open to our intuition and extrasensory perceptions. In the Garden, we were basically in a state of chaos. "The Fall" implied the arrival of the age of intellect, mind, thinking, and language. And mathematics is simply a form of language, information transfer, which addresses its own structure.
Therefore, numbers are no more archetypal than letters or words. This doesn't mean they lack a mystical dimension--just ask a Qabalist. Numbers are a different way of expressing ideas--a different translation. Numbers are a function of the space/time continuum, not really a function of chaos itself, or an archetype itself. They are a function of our intellect. Zero and infinity are just different symbols for chaos. The two different faces of chaos that we see are really one and the same thing. They are non-ideas. You get infinity when you divide anything by zero. Zero is inherently a part of zero, one and the same thing. They are just ways of describing a chaotic thing you can't really grasp.
Jungian, Robin Robertson says, "we think the world is filled with matter and energy (with "stuff"), but it is equally filled with "structure," and that structure is dependent on emptiness, nothingness. Magician and mystic, Aleister Crowley reflected the same thought as "Infinite space is the goddess Nuit", who represents all and nothing., as primordial matrix. The truth is there is no end to infinity even though we try to quantify it.
The Heart of Dreams
...Why are the [dreams] not understandable?...The answer must be that the dream is a natural occurrence, and that nature shows no inclination to offer her fruits gratis or according to human expectations. -- C.G. Jung
The paranormal dream that seems to transcend time and space remains no less controversial today than it was in the days of Cicero, the great Roman orator... --Stanley Krippner
According to Joseph Campbell, "Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream." With the popularization of his work, and more recently that of David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner, many people are becoming more aware of the importance of myth and dream in our daily lives. Awareness of personal mythology is enriching and adds to our self-knowledge. It gives us a deeper meaning to our lives, now that the major myths of our culture and religions no longer form the glue to bind our psychic life and profane experience together. The growing awareness of the value of myth, dreams, and ritual has produced a resurgence of interest in ancient practices and ceremonies to express our modern selves and invoke the aid of higher forces for our pursuits.
Myth, dream, and ritual meet in sacred psychology. This infintely expanded and extraordinary consciousness introduces us to a culture of the depths, a larger framework of reality. It is transformative. This experience is substantively real, and has consequences in daily life. It is the source of poetry, music, science, and art which we can tap for inspiration, sanctuary, or healing.
Jean Houston cites some physical changes which result from engaging in sacred psychology in THE SEARCH FOR THE BELOVED, pg. 33, (1987): "Part of the work of sacred psychology is to reeducate the brain and nervous system for reception of this nested reality. As you do this work regularly, you may notice some curious physiological phenomena such as energy rushes or perhaps signficant mood changes. Such occurences often indicate a change in your brain and nervous system, the creation of new electrochemical connections, and more dentdritic growth than usual. These changes provide the necessary increase in complexity in your biological equipment, permitting you clearer access to larger realities without going into overload and feeling blown out. Thus this work deconditions you from old habit structures of mind and body and reeducates and refines your biological structures."
For many reasons--spiritual hunger, curiosity, and our natural tendency toward structure and ritual in our lives--people are tuning into the wisdom of ancient cultures and healing traditions. It is within this fabric of mythic awareness that dreamhealing is practiced. Sacred psychology helps us promote growth and transformation. We learn to orchestrate and integrate different states of consciousness, build greater sensory awareness, tap the vast riches of the imaginal realm, incorporate multiple realities, and recognize our spiritual genesis.
DREAMHEALING
The history of dreams is longer than that of humanity itself. Science now tells us that dream may reflect a fundamental aspect of mammalian memory processing. Crucial information acquired during the waking state may be reprocessed during sleep. Humans have always sought to understand the meaning of dreams, and indeed science verifies that they are meaningful. Throughout the centuries there have been many approaches to the dream. Some of these approaches focused on the individual, others on society at large.
The shamanic practice of travelling in dreamtime through non-ordinary states of consciousness is perhaps our oldest lore about dreamlife. Through their dream journeys, shamans garnered the personal power and knowledge to help and heal the members of their societies. The ancient Egyptians believed that dreams possessed oracular power. In the Bible, for example, Joseph elucidates Pharoah's dreams and averts seven years of famine. Possibly the first recorded "dreamwork" was known as Egyptian "temple sleep," in which the participants entered a trance state. Hypnotic in nature, it probably was the prototype of practices re-iterated in Greece in the Asklepian dream healing temples.
Modern dreamwork employs various techniques, but trance is common to all the experiential methods. Mostly "natural trance" is employed rather than formal induction. Natural trance is induced simply by focusing inward, taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing the body. Modern dreamwork draws together these two threads of our heritage (dream and trance) in the relationship between therapist and client. This type of work creates a co-consciousness of the dreamworld shared by both participants. In the early 1900s, Freud proposed that dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious. He rediscovered an ancient truth known to many cultures who valued dreams as inspirational, curative, or alternative realities. Together, therapist and client create a shared reality, an altered state of consciousness, using the dream as a doorway to enter on a journey into the unknown depths of the imagination.
Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School had maintained for years that dreams were just responses to random nerve firings in the primitive brain, without purpose or meaning. He has recently revised his theories, acknowledging the deep psychological significance of dreams. The sense or plot of dream results from order that is imposed on the chaos of neural signals, according to Hobson's current view. "That order is a function of our own personal view of the world, our remote memories." In other words, he is saying, the individual's emotional vocabulary could be relevant to dreams, and that brain stem activation may simply function to switch from one dream episode to another. Jonathan Winson (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov. 1990) has suggested that theta rhythm "reflected a neural process whereby information essential to the survival of a species--gathered during the day--was reprocessed into memory during REM sleep."
Theta rhythm has been linked to spatial memory and survival behavior that is not genetically encoded, a response to changing environmental information. Theta is also sometimes associated with meditation states and the regeneration of body tissue. Today our culture is learning more and more respect for the nightly dramas that are so much a part of the fabric of our lives. This has not always been the case. Over the centuries the dream has been feared and maligned, ignored or distorted. Some have dreaded its portentous message, while others refused the notions it contained any meaning at all.
Dreams present us with a seemingly chaotic jumble of imagery which all agree is difficult to grasp with the rational mind. In primitive times, people took it for granted that dreams were related to the world of the supernatural beings in which they believed. Dreams served a special service: they predicted the future. As humans evolved out of their more intuitive-instinctual relationship with nature and became more rationally-oriented, dreams came to be interpreted in many ways. The phenomena always remains the same, but theories come and theories go. The extraordinary variations in the concept of dreams and in the impressions they produced on the dreamer made it difficult to formulate a coherent conception of them. The value and reliability of information processed as dreams has gone through as many changes as our culture. To Aristotle, arguably the grandfather of logical thought, the dream constituted a problem of psychology. He alleged that the dream is of daemonic origin, not god-sent.
The ancient Greeks believed that nature is daemonic, not divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human spirit, which of course has a kinship with the divine. The dream is defined as the psychic activity of the sleeper, inasmuch as he is asleep. Aristotle knew that a dream converts the slightest sensation perceived in sleep into intense sensations. The dream exaggerates and distorts. Nevertheless, he concluded that dreams might easily betray to the physician the first indications of an incipient physical change which had escaped observation by daytime consciousness. We shut our focus on the inner world of visions, hunches, etc. because we have to tune ourselves into the physical world. In that action we filter out much valuable input.
Earlier Greeks realized the inherent healing power within dreams and deified this force as the Olympian god, Apollo, and his son the healer Asklepios (known later in Rome as Aesculapius). When the potions and practices of medicine failed, one sought healing in the sacred dream. There were many dream temples throughout the countryside devoted to this very mission. Here one could end one's pilgrimage with purifications in the sacred spring in hopes that the god Asklepios would visit on his nightly sojourn. Priests attended these temples and the worshippers, but never interfered with the pure healing energy of the god by offering their own rational interpretations.
This ancient approach to the dream grounds modern non-interpretive, experiential dreamwork in a rich cultural heritage. Because they have an archetypal quality, these images emerge again and again through the centuries and their dynamic is as relevant for us today as it ever was. There is an archetypal timeless quality, something which transcends both space and time, to both dreams and dreamhealing. None of this means that there is no value in dream analysis or interpretation, but the dream's power is not limited to that. It is the ego, not the larger self, which forms and desires interpretation to give "meaning" to a dream. On the other hand, the meaning of dreams is inherent in the experience, much like the purpose of being IS being.
There are many ways the dream symbols help us gain conscious self-knowledge. However, in the last century perhaps too much emphasis was put on the rational side. So today, a lot of people who are interested in growth and healing, emphasize feeling and the heart over the head. They seem to wish to reject anything mental or especially intellectual. Again, this seems one-sided. The mind has its rightful place as an ally. It takes heart and mind to be whole. The proper role of the rational mind in dreamhealing is to surrender to the autonomous flow of the stream of consciousness, and to suspend any analysis of dream material until after the dreamjourney has revealed its unique qualities. After that, the mind may integrate the gut reactions with "what it knows."
It matters little if we take the Freudian approach and reduce most of the dream material to repressed sexuality and instinct, or grasp a broader concept of our movement toward the higher self, as the Jungians allege. We can even form Gestalt relationships with various dream aspects and become involved with our myriad of inner parts. There are several systems for accessing a feeling-identification with dream images, but they rarely lead to whole healing of the psyche and body. Some people feel they really "get" a dream when they experience the moment of "a-ha" or integration. The problem here is that stops the process of relating to the dream image by substituting some sort of intellectual inner "click" which may or may not be "right."
Dreams have many levels of reality, so no single interpretation can encompass that. A myriad of interpretations contain useful self-knowledge. Even a single dream can continue to unfold over the years since it contains an unfathomable depth of information. Beyond the symbols, beyond the "click," beyond "a-ha" is a healing state. It is a gift from your dream in the form of a healing state--a place which is without dialogue, which is about vision, which is about healing inside, and which is beyond mere psychological understanding. This is Mystery. So much of our time and energy is invested in building up models allowing us to formulate our ego view of the world of relationships and preferences.
Where the most profound healing comes in is in the holistic (body/mind) experience of the dream. When you re-enter a dream in therapy, both the conscious mind and subconscious cooperate in a new and wonderful way that you may never have experienced before. Unpleasant seeming dream imagery often transforms into a peaceful, healing place, if you allow the imagery to take your consciousness down into deeper, less structured awareness. The healing comes from simply "being there." This is a far cry from the scientific understanding of dreams.
However, Freud was not wrong when he postulated that the dream was the result of the conflict or cooperation of psychic forces. The process that underlies dreams, when studied, can elucidate the nature of these psychic forces. One of the main focuses in modern dreamhealing is on actualizing the healing power within dreams and other visionary consciousness states. There are many things you can do with a dream. One popular pastime now is the development of lucid dreaming, where you become conscious within the dream and direct your activities as in waking life. This may produce an increased sense of personal power and control.
However, there is a chance that this is an invasive intrusion on natural corrective forces by an over-active ego. The point of dreamwork is not to take the ego into the dreamworld. We need to bring the dream images into our conscious awareness and waking life. Since the dream state arises from beyond the ego, anything can happen, and natural laws of physical reality do not apply. Unbounded by any physical limits and laws, dream realities broaden awareness so that we can begin to experience our full range of humanness. Virtually anything is possible in the dream reality -- death, rebirth, time travel, out-of-body journeys, enhanced physical or mental powers, even extraordinary effects like healing and balancing. Yet, there is a voice in most of us that wants to discount the dream experience as a less important, inconsequential reality than our waking experience.
For example, a parent tells a child, "Go back to sleep; it was only a dream!", after the child has just awakened from a terrifying dream and still experiences the physiological consequences, which are very real. Disregarding the nightmare is one way to ignore the power of the dream as if it did not have impact or validity in the conscious awareness and experience of the child. The truth is that the experience of a nightmare is just as threatening and dreadful as any waking situation that evokes extreme fear and bodily contraction. In fact, the nightmare may usher in an even stiffer fright because it may be drawing on the fantastic and other-worldly aspects of the psyche. What is important to observe is that, in both cases, the fear experience causes bodily feelings and reactions.
Our natural reaction to a fearful situation like a nightmare is to turn away and avoid the experience entirely. This avoidance (a version of "out of sight, out of mind") sets our system off-balance and triggers the fight/flight syndrome. To re-establish the balance and harmony, it is usually necessary to stop avoiding the fear and turn around and move toward it, accepting it and owning it as a valid part of our reality. The monsters of our dreams are only alienated parts of ourselves, vying for attention. If we can embrace the fear, we no longer need to run away, and we can experience the peace that comes from having "let go" of the fear. Pain, either physical or emotional, is a marker that indicates where healing is needed within us; but we usually surround our pain with fear to protect us from experiencing it.
The fear is usually a base for our anger, or any of the other numerous denial and avoidance strategies we use. The nightmare makes us a gift of the fear and its underlying pain. It leads us to the inner places that need healing, and provides the healing as we experience expansion within of our "stuck", blocked, lifeless parts. At the heart of our approach is the notion that because dreams affect us on our primary experience level -- the body -- and can stir intense multi-sensual feelings and reactions in us, dreams can be used to enter a bodily place of dis-ease and restore the natural flow and balance to that place. In honoring the dream we draw from the ancient healing tradition of the past, and the best of modern psychotherapeutic technique.
The ancient word for therapy, therapeuin, originally meant "service to the gods." In this case therapy facilitates the healing process of the Greek god Asklepios. He was god of both dreams and healing. The content of the dreams -- the characters, the inanimate objects, the activities, the feelings, the colors -- can all be doorways into the infinite inner territory of our myriad inner selves. They are states of consciousness that facilitate healing on mental, physical and spiritual levels. If we can go deeply into the experience of a dream such as the nightmare, for example, we can bring a healing to the dis-ease that caused the nightmare.
Dreams and nightmares are a unique way to move our awareness into our inner feelings and bodily places of flow and blockage. With a remembered dream, we already have in our grasp a good start at an inner resolution of the process. Borrowing from C.G. Jung, we propose the idea that dream symbols arise from the psychic energies that create us and bind us together with all other life forces, the collective unconscious.
However, moving beyond analytical and interpretive methods of treating dreams, it is possible for us to experience directly the timeless and dimensionless primal force that creates dreams. To do so we have to use dreamhealing to travel beyond the symbols to their very source. We call these experiences dream journeys, in the old shamanic sense. The therapist functions as a guide to take the client deeper than the surface symbolism. Symbols are merely a means of capturing our attention -- of attracting, appeasing, or scarring our ego's conscious waking awareness.
Any illness or disease, as the name itself suggests, has at its source a state of dis-ease or out-of-balance energies. Like the shamans of old, Jung noted that the onset of any serious disease was reflected in dreamlife. In addition to leading to the source of our dis-ease, dreams and nightmares also have within them the potential for expansive experiences which can heal and bring us back to a state of balance and health. They are both diagnostic and prescriptive, in that sense. They reveal both problem and solution, if we only learn how to attend to their clarion call. On the surface and analytical level, dream symbols usually relate to the ego's particular concerns.
Some "big dreams" carry a more mysterious, archetypal or collective value. However, each symbol is actually of equal value. They are doorways opening into the formless, chaotic energy underneath it which gave rise to it. Interpreting the symbol gives us a more detailed description and picture of the doorway, but does not give us the experience of going beyond that doorway and exploring experientially what is on the other side over the threshold in those primal energies. Dreamhealing centers around the idea that by going into and then past the experience of the symbols, we can experience the consciousness that created them. This creative state is a source of healing and re-creation. Some symbols offer access to memories of the past, some reveal future events, others can lead us to our inner healer -- the part of us that can provide the energy we need to restore balance and harmony within ourselves.
Much work has been done lately with imagery and healing, usually importing symbols or images into the client's visualization. The healing tale or teaching tale is used in both spiritual and secular counseling. The "imported metaphor" is part of the stock-in-trade repertoire of Ericksonian hypnosis. The results are inherently stronger when the individual produces their own imagery while the therapist unobtrusively helps the client avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgent fantasy. T
he client is guided to stick with the metaphors that arise from within to describe what his state of being and experience is like. You can experiment with this yourself, simply by asking yourself a few simple questions: What would you like to have happen? When it isn't happening, how do you know its not? And where do you feel that in your body? And what's it like? By this means you create your own metaphor for your personal experience, whether it comes from dreamlife or some problem, or a childhood trauma.
The therapist functions solely as a guide to the inner realms, since it is familiar territory to the practitioner. We can use the well-known map analogy, noting that the map can only be a partial representation or symbol of the actual terrain. For example, looking at any map of the countryside we can see lines that mark rivers, hills, and other topological features; however, to walk through an actual old growth forest with a compass, climb the hills and pitch camp under the protective canopy of the trees, and listen to one of those rivers imprints a much deeper impression of the forest than the map ever could. It is a full experience of what is behind the map.
Trying to experience the terrain through the map is like interpreting the symbol, while the experience of going into and beyond the symbols is as ever-changing and alive as an excursion deep into the forest and the mysteries of nature. Another example of the distinction is the difference between reading a recipe and tasting the dish. The savor certainly isn't the same. A dream guide, like a river guide, takes the person through the turbulent (chaotic) waters of the psyche, past the rocks and boulders of their fear, to find the safe passage where the river flows easily into the calm beyond the rapids. The therapist's approach evolves in the moment to keep pace with the flow of the client's process deep in the heart of the dream. Consequently, the client has an active part in the healing process and learns psychological self-care. Flowing with the experience through the progression of multi-sensory images provides the pathway to healing. The experience of finding an inner healing state is invaluable, as it teaches firsthand that the healer is within.
The outer healers are only representations or mirrors of what is already inside. The healing process and myth are deeply engrained in our lives, as individuals and societies. Each culture evolves its own variations on health and disease, and those able to aid in recovery from physical and mental distress. The problem with the old western healing paradigm is that the perception is that healing comes from without. In our culture now we are developing many alternatives to mechanistic medical and psychological practices. One of those alternatives is awareness of personal mythology. Jung suggested that each individual life is based on a particular myth. By discovering that myth, we can live it consciously and adapt ourselves to our destiny, thus harmonizing inner and outer experience, and allowing our true individuality to emerge.
But mythic living doesn't necessarily mean living one myth, since the patterns of all god/dess forms are within us. The myth does not provide us with a blueprint for daily living concerning what we should or ought to do. Instead, it helps us in the process of discovering who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. They spark our sense of discovery and urge us to question and go deeper. There is a chaotic assortment of mythical images within each of us, but sometimes certain themes emerge and assert their priority on a life. So, an individual life seems to strongly parallel a specific myth theme. One way this can manifest is through an uncanny series of synchronistic events, wherein a particular myth becomes the paradigmatic model of a life. The quest for actualization of this myth motivates a variation on the age-old journey of the hero. What's New with My Subject? In ancient Greece, if you wanted to ensure success in some undertaking you invoked the god who oversaw your particular endeavor with prayers and offerings.
As stated before, Asklepios was the Greek god of healing and dream. He was the son of Apollo and the mortal Coronis who was slain by Apollo for infidelity before the child was born. Taken prematurely from his mother, Asklepios was raised by the centaur Chiron, who was a master of the healing arts. Asklepios was an able student who soon surpassed his teacher and incurred both the wrath and blessings of the various gods and goddesses. To protect him from these whims, Zeus immortalized him as the Divine Healer. An entire healing tradition developed in ancient Greece based on this myth. The medical physicians became known as Asklepiads; however, the Asklepian dream healing temple was the place to go if their medicines and treatments failed.
At the Asklepian temple, the god himself visited mortals in their dreams to bring Divine healing. At the temple, Asklepian priests oversaw the rites and procedures which brought the sick mortal into direct contact with the god. These temples were located at great distances from the cities and populated areas in Greece so that to reach one a pilgrimage was necessary. Having arrived at the temple, one was received by the temple priests who began the sometimes lengthy process of determining whether or not the god had summoned one for healing. The priests did have a therapeutic function in the temple, but they were not in any way therapists, nor did they interpret any of the supplicant's dreams.
The priests determined whether or not one had been summoned by Asklepios by making discreet inquiries about the god's appearance in their dreamlife. An appearance by the god signified that one had indeed been invited and was ready to enter the temple. The form which Asklepios assumed in dreams was either a snake, or less commonly a dog (or wolf). The next steps of bodily and mind purification were begun. Another interview with a priest was held because it was recognized that unless a person was conscious and accepting of his present life condition he could not expect a healing from the god. After the interview, the patient's body went through cleansing in the springs or streams around which the temples were always constructed. And at last, the supplicant was prepared to approach the god.
Since Asklepios visited the sick in their dreams, a special chamber, called the abaton (a Greek word meaning "a place not to be entered into uninvited"), was provided where the person would remain alone and asleep. The couch inside where the patient lay was known as the kline. This period of waiting for the god was called the incubation. After dreaming the patient was interviewed by the priests who, without interpreting the dream, would instruct the patient as to whether or not the god had brought the healing. Sometimes many sessions in the abaton on the kline were necessary to come into contact with the god and the sick did not leave the temple until they were healed. As far as interpreting the dream, the belief was that the experience of the dream and not an interpretation was how the healing came to the sick.
The healing was accomplished through the direct intervention of the god himself with the patient's soul through the dream. As a final part of the healing process, a fee was paid to the temple priests as an offering for the ongoing maintenance and work of the Temple. It was said that a failure to do so would result in a relapse of the dis-eased condition. Testimonies were inscribed on the temple walls attesting to the miraculous and powerful healing which went on in the temples, including cures for afflictions like blindness.
In this way the Asklepian dreamhealing went on for hundreds of years. This tradition is continued in dreamhealing. The eight phases of dreamhealing reflect an archetypal healing process. This healing myth is reiterated in the techniques ("ceremonies") of many disciplines. These steps form the real sequence of inner healing no matter what the outer form, including traditional medical practice. These phases include: 1) the pilgrimage; 2) the confession; 3) purification; 4) the offering; 5) dream quest; 6) dreamhealing; 7) work on dreams; 8) re-entry or integration. The entire process is contingent on a healing sanctuary, whether that refuge can be found without or within.
Processing is the principle of assisting an individual to look at his own existence, and improve his ability to confront what he is and where he is for greater adaptability, wholeness, and health.
THE PILGRIMAGE
The pilgrimage satisfies the necessary first step in healing. It is important because one commits one's energies and resources to healing. It is a notice of intent. The outcome of the process is directly proportional to the personal energy put into it, as well as the intent. As in ancient times, the refuge, retreat, or sanctuary is a place where the seeker can devote all of their energy to their dreams and healing without worry about the outer world. That sense of safety is a key factor in healing, because healing is an act of trust. Sanctuary is being in a state of total safety which supports trust. Healing involves pushing past old boundaries and negating old confining belief systems and that too is best done in trust and safety.
Disease is a state of deep inner fear and pain, and it is easier to face fears and pain from a base of safety. Most therapists know this, but generally conceive of it as a pleasant office, confidentiality and being game and script free. But it takes more--a deep respect and honoring of the natural healing process from within, rather than egotistically claiming to be "the healer." This is why we jokingly call Doctors -- M.D.s -- "Minor Deities."
Dreams and visions seem so fragile, so whimsical, and insubstantial in our pragmatic, materially oriented society. When the substantial and concrete is valued more than the mystical and insubstantial it is more difficult to validate one's own inner life. This is perhaps one reason the retreats were located a distance from any city. To live and survive in the civilized world requires a well-structured, strong ego and intellect just to deal with its technological complexity and its threat to our sense of self.
But the ego, in defending itself often feels and acts directly opposite to our deeper wisdom. In a word, we go against ourselves, a case of ego vs. higher self. This creates a state of tension or dis-ease which eventually manifests throughout our whole organism as mental and physical diseases that assume the shape of this inner conflict. For example, most of us have a deep and basic fear and unease over how we are impacting our planet's ecosystems. We may or may not be aware of it, depending on our vested interests and whether or not we identify as environmentalists, but it is there. Yet, in our daily battle to survive we burn fossil fuel driving to work in automobiles that deplete resources and generate pollution. We support hundreds of other activities daily that similarly degenerate the ecosystem. This deeply distresses, puts part of us out of ease with ourselves. We are torn in opposite directions by the pulls of our survival instincts. It may be out of our awareness but we are distressed by it.
Similarly, a person may continue to smoke cigarettes fully aware of the building health risks incurred. The fear of cancer may remain subconscious, but it exists, nevertheless. Most degenerative diseases reflect this state of distress. Degenerative is also a word that characterizes what is happening to the ecosystem. For example, cancer is both a symbol and a physical manifestation of our existential conflict. We could describe cancer as living cells in a state of uncontrollable growth destroying their host organism. This is a perfect metaphor for our relationship as a species to the ecosystem. Aerial photographs of cities bear a remarkable likeness to photographs of microscope slides of cancer cells.
The outer disease assumes the shape of the inner state of dis-ease. Nature and wilderness, however, invite flow and merging of the spirit and soul with the ego. Nature's threats are not to the ego or self alone, but to the entire organism. They require instinctual or intuitive responses involving the whole organism. This allows the ego self and the deeper instinctual self to cooperate in a dynamic balance and that fosters ease. That, plus the beauty and serenity of wilderness, takes us back to our grounding-founding state. Nothing has the ability to return harmony to soul and ego so readily as nature. The nature-mystic experience is one of the most easily accessed non-ordinary states. Untainted wilderness is possibly one of the least realized yet most valuable healing resources that we have. Water, in particular, was important to the dream temples, and there was always a healing spring within the precinct.
THE CONFESSION
The confession helps you target where in your life you have missed the mark. The word "sin" is simply an old Greek archery term (hamartia) for "missing the mark." So if you miss, you simply try again. This self-analysis goes beyond an intellectual review of wrongs, shoulds and ought-tos. It is a special form of in-sight. It signifies attention is turning inward, and becoming reflective.
Dreamhealing begins with the premise that each feature of the dream is a part of the dreamer. One can enter a symbol and speak as if one were that symbol and learn a lot about perspectives other than the ego. It is a way to experience the multiplicity of consciousness within each of us. Many ego parts exist in states of conflict or dis-ease with each other, and by experiencing or becoming the symbols in a dream, and exploring the relationships among them, one eventually can resolve, or move beyond the rifts to a 'gestalt' or inner merging. This signifies the unification of conflicting parts into a state of wholeness or integrity. This is a very healing experience for the ego.
Occasionally in Gestalt dreamwork, the therapist-client team slips past the experience of the symbol to some deeper state of consciousness. These are confusing initially, because they don't compute with traditional training or experience, but they are intriguing. If you merely forage deeper into the dreams, following the dream symbols through and beyond the surface features, they function as doorways into profound states of consciousness, very healing states of consciousness. There are apparently extremely powerful energies or forces within dreams. Just getting to them and experiencing them leads to profound healings. What is really amazing is that they seem to have effects on physical levels, resulting in physical as well as mental restructuring of self image. Perhaps someday we can devise experiments to track these processes with biofeedback. It may eventually become possible to monitor physiology and feedback the unique pattern of mental and physical states that promote healing on an individualized level.
The confession is an extremely important part of the healing and letting-go process. The Asklepians believed that you couldn't be healed or visited by the god Asklepios until you were at ease with your own soul. Paralleling that practice, the confessional during a retreat is more a case of exploring the state of disease at many levels and from many perspectives. It usually ends up looking more like psychotherapy. The physical and emotional diseases reflect or manifest inner states of dis-ease between ego-personal self and the deeper soul-self, or among the separate parts of the ego. Identifying these out-of-ease states is the purpose of the psychotherapy-like confessional. It is a process of becoming more aware of and intimately acquainted with the disease and one's relationship to it on a very personal level.
Harking back to the meaning of sin as simply missing the mark, you have missed where you have sinned. So if you sin, try again with another arrow to reach your target. This is a closed-loop feedback system. It is important for the individual to actually hear their own voice identifying the problem area. Another aspect of a psychotherapeutic confessional is that you also have the opportunity to declare and validate out loud, to yourself and others, what you have done right. Often in life this simple validation is unavailable or overlooked. We all need a pat on the back once in a while for our growth and well being. Willingly taking time to self-reflect on one's positive and negative aspects promotes being honest with yourself. It implies taking personal responsibility in the sense of recognizing your personal ability to respond.
The dream guide functions in a manner similar to that of the ancient dream priest who oversaw the dream temples. A guide helps you make a trip through unfamiliar territory. They help you prepare for the trip and guide you to the best routes, but they don't take the trip for you -- they just provide the guidance. The therapist's role, like the shaman of old, is to lead people on journeys deep into the unfamiliar terrain of the self and to the balancing states of consciousness that ease or heal. This is likely what the dream priests did. The word "priest" had different connotations to the Greeks than us. The role of the Asklepian priest was to prepare, and guide the seekers to meet the healing god in the dream. They don't claim to be, or to speak for (channel), or interpret (analyst) the god. They simply guide each individual to their own personal encounter.
PURIFICATION
Purification prior to entry into sacred ground or sacred space has always been a priority in all forms of magic. And, make no mistake, the ancient technique was a form of magic with its own protocols. Today we can use a sweatlodge or sauna to purify through sweat and heat, a spa for water purification, and a healthy diet of natural foods. Most of these are easily available. If dreamhealing is used in a traditional setting, the client may take a ritual bath, perhaps with herbs, before arriving for the session. It is a symbolic gesture of intent, and sets the tone that one is on a sacred mission with a higher aim in mind.
Both purification and confession imply relieving oneself of sin. These practices also help reduce the stress of modern life. Purification of mind and spirit can be an important symbolic part of the process, preparing one for transformative challenge and change. When it comes to purifying the body, the cleansing needs to be literal. Most people's bodies are filled with poisons, pesticides, preservatives and other anti-life chemicals in food. Nearly all meat is full of steroids and antibiotics, and even amphetamine residues used in chicken-raising. A more natural diet cleans up the body chemistry. As you truly come to love yourself, you desire only the best for yourself both inside as well as outside.
Some people use exercise, music, or drumming, and dancing partly as catharsis to clear out old emotional baggage. What is most important is not the form of the purification but letting the creative process flow to take whatever form is appropriate for the individual.
THE OFFERING
The dreamhealing offering may also take many forms. The most surface level, of course, involves dealing with paying fees for your therapeutic sanctuary. It has ever been so, since the days of the temples. In fact, the Greeks believed that stinting on this offering could jeopardize the healing. Ceremonial offerings invoke a deeper and more personal commitment. Sometimes we create a more formal personal offering ceremony for individuals on retreat. But the offering happens at many levels, ceremonial or not.
During a ceremony, the seeker at some point is asked to offer something of themselves to help induce a healing dream. It is another personal energy commitment to healing, like the pilgrimage. For example, one might offer to devote time to working with the homeless, or commit to picking up three pieces of litter everyday, or some other form of community service. This offering is committing to give some form of service beyond one's self for the collective good. The offering places even more value on the healing. It helps satisfy or ease the soul-ego conflicts. Further, following through on the offering puts ongoing energy into the healing process to prevent the dis-ease creeping back. Healing is a mind or mindful journey and so you have to help the mind to prepare and execute it. The offering helps invoke that state of mind.
DREAM QUEST
A "dream journey" uses the mind, in the broader concept of mind, to enter one's healing states. States of mind or consciousness can manifest, for example, as the "placebo effect" in medical terminology -- or in the evangelist's terms, faith healing. It is a journey to our ultimate creative state of mind which is the source of our dreams and imagination. If you are so minded you might even consider this state to be "the Creator," "Higher Power," or "God force" within. In Jungian terms it would mean an experience of the healing power of the Self. Healing is an act of creation, and that part of us, our creative spirit or the god within, speaks most vividly through dreams and imagination.
Even Einstein considered imagination more important than knowledge. It is not an anti-scientific approach to dream. A dream is a mystical expression of imagination and creative mind which is what ritual and ceremony help invoke. There is safety in ritual and ceremony--secureness in it. It is another symbolic act of commitment to an inner faith. Ceremony by-passes the mind or intellect; it boggles it. It is a way of opening to a state of grace or faith, and these are integral aspects of mystical healing. Ceremony reminds you of something you already have within you, but don't usually notice. It brings it to surface awareness.
Because ceremonies are not rational, they confuse the rational mind. They appeal to the senses and take us outside of our usual ego experiences and beyond the experience of the rational or intellectual ego mind. This is where you find these healing states of consciousness, beyond the rational ego mind, in the mystic. Any time you turn your attention within and become receptive to yourself you enter a whole new world of experience, which is just as real in effects as the outer world. You can facilitate change within yourself and cooperate with your personal growth or evolution. The only problem is getting around the habitual ego identity with its resistances to change. Many techniques of hypnotherapy have been used for years to accomplish this.
One of the more famous, the "confusion" technique was popularized by therapist Milton Erickson, a pioneer in modern hypnotic therapy. Any momentary disequilibrium of either the mind or body can induce a trance state which by-passes the conscious censoring ego and creates receptivity in the subconscious. The ego mind is formed from the sum accumulation of our life's experiences and our reactions to them. It sets the limits or boundaries of our usual thing-feeling-behaving patterns.
Based on our experiences, at deep levels of mind we form multi-sensory images of self and world -- images that capture their essence and shape our belief systems which in turn shape our ego and personality. Not only do these primal sensory energy images and beliefs limits us, they also contain the "psychic" distortions which form the nuclei of our dis-eases. This structure is the ego-mind. It is limited, but what lies beyond is infinite mind or consciousness. It is our source of energy for re-imagining ourselves and healing.
New or unfamiliar experiences, irrational ones like ancient dream rituals that don't compute or match with your normal experiences cause confusion and disorientation in the ego-mind, and can even turn it off. In fact, most of the techniques used in dream guiding are based on fooling this part of the mind. In ceremony, the ego either automatically or voluntarily steps aside and becomes willing to relinquish its fantasy of "control." It becomes more vulnerable and open, particularly if the environment is safe and supportive.
This is when the deep wisdom, the collective infinite consciousness tapped into through dreams and visions helps transform the old beliefs and images into more ease-ful, less limiting ones. Then one opens to free and easy states of mind. A healing retreat creates a different world image, one in which the inner mystical experiences, dreams and visions, are held to be equally, if not more important than outer processes.
With sanctuary one is free to explore them -- the permission is there in the environment. Virtually all religious traditions throughout recorded history held that the deities communicated with mortals through dreams and visions. Yet, direct communication with deity is a new, unsettling thought for many people. These experiences are neither encouraged nor allowed in our culture by its healing and religious institutions.
DREAMHEALING
Healing doesn't happen with a one or two time workshop, nor will one dream accomplish it entirely. Great progress comes in the initial stages occasionally, but it is not probable and most likely will only be symptomatic healing. Deep healing or restructuring takes a full commitment of self, time, and energy. Most disease has taken years, perhaps a lifetime to develop and permeate all levels of our organism. By the time it takes on physical or emotional symptoms, it has been around for awhile and involves the whole person and most of their life patterns. There is a momentum to each life and that is not usually changed overnight. It might not take three months, or it may take longer.
Still, a retreat gives a person time and sanctuary and a better chance to explore themselves thoroughly to make deep physical and mental changes, to change the momentum. In ancient Greece, the dream priest would look for a sign of the god in dreams. If they saw a sign of the god, then that was a sign that the healing had already occurred. Then you simply paid your fee for the upkeep of the temple, and left. As therapists, we can't say, "Oh, there is a snake in your dream--you've been healed--see you later." The ancient healings may have been conducted in this manner, but it is not necessarily enough for the modern ego, because it is a surrender of personal power to an external force which only visits in certain dreams.
Dreamhealing participants learn to realize that they are really the power behind their healing, not the therapist. That is much more empowering, and real healing is an empowering process, an opportunity for personal evolution. Knowledge of self-healing capacities goes back over the millennia. That is a fundamental way dreamhealing differs from the ancient technique, or for that matter, most modern medical or new age healing practice. Common to shamanism, psychology, and the medical approaches are their implications that the healing power is outside of the person seeking healing. Somehow it is the doctor or his medicines and techniques, the shaman or the God -- someone, something, or somepower outside of the self who provides the healing. That disempowers.
WORK ON DREAMS
Bringing the awareness or senses of the inner healing process from the dream into the conscious or rational mind, which is what a dream journey does, helps us to realize the healing in the outer world also. It draws the ego-mind into a partnership of cooperation to make outer changes in lifestyle and behavior that compliment or support the inner ones. The individual is empowered and takes a more active -- pro-active -- role. The pattern is learn, commit, do. Dream therapy often triggers surprising changes in life patterns without intellectual awareness of how the change of attitude occurs.
For example, some dreamhealing participants find they are simply unable to eat certain foods, or lose the desire to smoke after a dream session, even though the work didn't touch on that at all. It often takes the mind weeks or months to finally understand the depths and changes in personal dynamics that the dream therapy initiates. But it is still an inner process. We could describe it as intellect catching up to wisdom. So, dreamhealing incorporates and expands on Asklepian dreamhealing. It was not derived from or contrived to fit this archetypal model. It emerges spontaneously, reiterating the same themes, loud and clear. It is a new paradigm for healing, a model that incorporates the old but only as part. It integrates science and mysticism yielding a view beyond the capabilities of either system alone. Dreams themselves, as the long-forgotten healers, do this.
From the scientific side, there has been much research and acknowledgment that dreams are necessary to health. They are believed to exert a balancing effect, and without them we soon show signs of mental and physical deterioration. For example, studies have shown that sleep deprivation within days results in extreme nervousness and anxiety, hallucinations, or delusions.
Freud, Jung, and Fritz Perls were among the earliest contemporary scientists who recognized the healing potential in dreams and used them as therapeutic tools, but they did so more from the superficial ego and interpretive levels. Jung hinted at much deeper aspects of dreams, but still remained interpretive in his dream therapy. Perls recognized that it was the experiences in the dream that were healing, but limited it to the ego. Most "in depth" psychotherapies include dream therapy. And, of course, from the mystical perspective dreams come from the deities, and give us the gifts of prophecy, wisdom, and their unique perspective. By and large, dreams are the forgotten healer. When healing is needed, very few people think of turning to their dreams.
RE-ENTRY
Dreams provide a missing feminine element as contrasted with the characteristically masculine approach in the medical healing model. It is an intuitive one where the person needing healing is acted on from the outside by therapists, chemicals, surgery, or technology. Dreams, on the other hand, are a personal inner healing, a non-intrusive one that arises from within, a creative healing of faith. Modern medicine is practiced in bright lights and technically outfitted hospitals. Dreams are the night's creations from the soul and sleep. The contrast is that of a masculine quality, with a feminine quality. This doesn't mean dreams should necessarily replace allopathic healing; they provide a balance and wholeness it is missing -- the yin and yang complementing the whole. It is a marriage between dreamhealing and medical science that seems most appropriate. Dream therapy in hospitals might speed recovery rates from surgery and other medical techniques and treatments. It would certainly empower patients with a sense of personal and deep participation in the healing process.
For the skeptic, who wonders how ancient practices like Aesculapian mythology could play a role in our lives today, we suggest an open-mindedness about dreams. We can learn from them without having to become "true believers." A new paradigm for healing has to incorporate all the models, but not be bound or limited to them. This includes the old and new medical technology, psychology, Aesculapian dreamhealing, shamanism, and anything else with something to offer. But it needs to be much more than just the sum of all of them. The old models are incomplete and inadequate, too limited and narrowly focused. They are entrenched in dogma and habitual ways of viewing reality, and the patient.
Contemporary medical or psychological therapies, perhaps even more so than the ancient practices, are biased belief systems. Immediate change is imperative because, for starters, we need to heal our species' relationship with its environment. It is one of dis-ease. None of the old models motivates us or shows us how to heal it--creativity will be required. Healers cannot just focus on only healing parts of the individual any more, the issues are much broader. The survival of our species is at stake.
The paranormal dream that seems to transcend time and space remains no less controversial today than it was in the days of Cicero, the great Roman orator... --Stanley Krippner
According to Joseph Campbell, "Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream." With the popularization of his work, and more recently that of David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner, many people are becoming more aware of the importance of myth and dream in our daily lives. Awareness of personal mythology is enriching and adds to our self-knowledge. It gives us a deeper meaning to our lives, now that the major myths of our culture and religions no longer form the glue to bind our psychic life and profane experience together. The growing awareness of the value of myth, dreams, and ritual has produced a resurgence of interest in ancient practices and ceremonies to express our modern selves and invoke the aid of higher forces for our pursuits.
Myth, dream, and ritual meet in sacred psychology. This infintely expanded and extraordinary consciousness introduces us to a culture of the depths, a larger framework of reality. It is transformative. This experience is substantively real, and has consequences in daily life. It is the source of poetry, music, science, and art which we can tap for inspiration, sanctuary, or healing.
Jean Houston cites some physical changes which result from engaging in sacred psychology in THE SEARCH FOR THE BELOVED, pg. 33, (1987): "Part of the work of sacred psychology is to reeducate the brain and nervous system for reception of this nested reality. As you do this work regularly, you may notice some curious physiological phenomena such as energy rushes or perhaps signficant mood changes. Such occurences often indicate a change in your brain and nervous system, the creation of new electrochemical connections, and more dentdritic growth than usual. These changes provide the necessary increase in complexity in your biological equipment, permitting you clearer access to larger realities without going into overload and feeling blown out. Thus this work deconditions you from old habit structures of mind and body and reeducates and refines your biological structures."
For many reasons--spiritual hunger, curiosity, and our natural tendency toward structure and ritual in our lives--people are tuning into the wisdom of ancient cultures and healing traditions. It is within this fabric of mythic awareness that dreamhealing is practiced. Sacred psychology helps us promote growth and transformation. We learn to orchestrate and integrate different states of consciousness, build greater sensory awareness, tap the vast riches of the imaginal realm, incorporate multiple realities, and recognize our spiritual genesis.
DREAMHEALING
The history of dreams is longer than that of humanity itself. Science now tells us that dream may reflect a fundamental aspect of mammalian memory processing. Crucial information acquired during the waking state may be reprocessed during sleep. Humans have always sought to understand the meaning of dreams, and indeed science verifies that they are meaningful. Throughout the centuries there have been many approaches to the dream. Some of these approaches focused on the individual, others on society at large.
The shamanic practice of travelling in dreamtime through non-ordinary states of consciousness is perhaps our oldest lore about dreamlife. Through their dream journeys, shamans garnered the personal power and knowledge to help and heal the members of their societies. The ancient Egyptians believed that dreams possessed oracular power. In the Bible, for example, Joseph elucidates Pharoah's dreams and averts seven years of famine. Possibly the first recorded "dreamwork" was known as Egyptian "temple sleep," in which the participants entered a trance state. Hypnotic in nature, it probably was the prototype of practices re-iterated in Greece in the Asklepian dream healing temples.
Modern dreamwork employs various techniques, but trance is common to all the experiential methods. Mostly "natural trance" is employed rather than formal induction. Natural trance is induced simply by focusing inward, taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing the body. Modern dreamwork draws together these two threads of our heritage (dream and trance) in the relationship between therapist and client. This type of work creates a co-consciousness of the dreamworld shared by both participants. In the early 1900s, Freud proposed that dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious. He rediscovered an ancient truth known to many cultures who valued dreams as inspirational, curative, or alternative realities. Together, therapist and client create a shared reality, an altered state of consciousness, using the dream as a doorway to enter on a journey into the unknown depths of the imagination.
Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School had maintained for years that dreams were just responses to random nerve firings in the primitive brain, without purpose or meaning. He has recently revised his theories, acknowledging the deep psychological significance of dreams. The sense or plot of dream results from order that is imposed on the chaos of neural signals, according to Hobson's current view. "That order is a function of our own personal view of the world, our remote memories." In other words, he is saying, the individual's emotional vocabulary could be relevant to dreams, and that brain stem activation may simply function to switch from one dream episode to another. Jonathan Winson (SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov. 1990) has suggested that theta rhythm "reflected a neural process whereby information essential to the survival of a species--gathered during the day--was reprocessed into memory during REM sleep."
Theta rhythm has been linked to spatial memory and survival behavior that is not genetically encoded, a response to changing environmental information. Theta is also sometimes associated with meditation states and the regeneration of body tissue. Today our culture is learning more and more respect for the nightly dramas that are so much a part of the fabric of our lives. This has not always been the case. Over the centuries the dream has been feared and maligned, ignored or distorted. Some have dreaded its portentous message, while others refused the notions it contained any meaning at all.
Dreams present us with a seemingly chaotic jumble of imagery which all agree is difficult to grasp with the rational mind. In primitive times, people took it for granted that dreams were related to the world of the supernatural beings in which they believed. Dreams served a special service: they predicted the future. As humans evolved out of their more intuitive-instinctual relationship with nature and became more rationally-oriented, dreams came to be interpreted in many ways. The phenomena always remains the same, but theories come and theories go. The extraordinary variations in the concept of dreams and in the impressions they produced on the dreamer made it difficult to formulate a coherent conception of them. The value and reliability of information processed as dreams has gone through as many changes as our culture. To Aristotle, arguably the grandfather of logical thought, the dream constituted a problem of psychology. He alleged that the dream is of daemonic origin, not god-sent.
The ancient Greeks believed that nature is daemonic, not divine; that is to say, the dream is not a supernatural revelation, but is subject to the laws of the human spirit, which of course has a kinship with the divine. The dream is defined as the psychic activity of the sleeper, inasmuch as he is asleep. Aristotle knew that a dream converts the slightest sensation perceived in sleep into intense sensations. The dream exaggerates and distorts. Nevertheless, he concluded that dreams might easily betray to the physician the first indications of an incipient physical change which had escaped observation by daytime consciousness. We shut our focus on the inner world of visions, hunches, etc. because we have to tune ourselves into the physical world. In that action we filter out much valuable input.
Earlier Greeks realized the inherent healing power within dreams and deified this force as the Olympian god, Apollo, and his son the healer Asklepios (known later in Rome as Aesculapius). When the potions and practices of medicine failed, one sought healing in the sacred dream. There were many dream temples throughout the countryside devoted to this very mission. Here one could end one's pilgrimage with purifications in the sacred spring in hopes that the god Asklepios would visit on his nightly sojourn. Priests attended these temples and the worshippers, but never interfered with the pure healing energy of the god by offering their own rational interpretations.
This ancient approach to the dream grounds modern non-interpretive, experiential dreamwork in a rich cultural heritage. Because they have an archetypal quality, these images emerge again and again through the centuries and their dynamic is as relevant for us today as it ever was. There is an archetypal timeless quality, something which transcends both space and time, to both dreams and dreamhealing. None of this means that there is no value in dream analysis or interpretation, but the dream's power is not limited to that. It is the ego, not the larger self, which forms and desires interpretation to give "meaning" to a dream. On the other hand, the meaning of dreams is inherent in the experience, much like the purpose of being IS being.
There are many ways the dream symbols help us gain conscious self-knowledge. However, in the last century perhaps too much emphasis was put on the rational side. So today, a lot of people who are interested in growth and healing, emphasize feeling and the heart over the head. They seem to wish to reject anything mental or especially intellectual. Again, this seems one-sided. The mind has its rightful place as an ally. It takes heart and mind to be whole. The proper role of the rational mind in dreamhealing is to surrender to the autonomous flow of the stream of consciousness, and to suspend any analysis of dream material until after the dreamjourney has revealed its unique qualities. After that, the mind may integrate the gut reactions with "what it knows."
It matters little if we take the Freudian approach and reduce most of the dream material to repressed sexuality and instinct, or grasp a broader concept of our movement toward the higher self, as the Jungians allege. We can even form Gestalt relationships with various dream aspects and become involved with our myriad of inner parts. There are several systems for accessing a feeling-identification with dream images, but they rarely lead to whole healing of the psyche and body. Some people feel they really "get" a dream when they experience the moment of "a-ha" or integration. The problem here is that stops the process of relating to the dream image by substituting some sort of intellectual inner "click" which may or may not be "right."
Dreams have many levels of reality, so no single interpretation can encompass that. A myriad of interpretations contain useful self-knowledge. Even a single dream can continue to unfold over the years since it contains an unfathomable depth of information. Beyond the symbols, beyond the "click," beyond "a-ha" is a healing state. It is a gift from your dream in the form of a healing state--a place which is without dialogue, which is about vision, which is about healing inside, and which is beyond mere psychological understanding. This is Mystery. So much of our time and energy is invested in building up models allowing us to formulate our ego view of the world of relationships and preferences.
Where the most profound healing comes in is in the holistic (body/mind) experience of the dream. When you re-enter a dream in therapy, both the conscious mind and subconscious cooperate in a new and wonderful way that you may never have experienced before. Unpleasant seeming dream imagery often transforms into a peaceful, healing place, if you allow the imagery to take your consciousness down into deeper, less structured awareness. The healing comes from simply "being there." This is a far cry from the scientific understanding of dreams.
However, Freud was not wrong when he postulated that the dream was the result of the conflict or cooperation of psychic forces. The process that underlies dreams, when studied, can elucidate the nature of these psychic forces. One of the main focuses in modern dreamhealing is on actualizing the healing power within dreams and other visionary consciousness states. There are many things you can do with a dream. One popular pastime now is the development of lucid dreaming, where you become conscious within the dream and direct your activities as in waking life. This may produce an increased sense of personal power and control.
However, there is a chance that this is an invasive intrusion on natural corrective forces by an over-active ego. The point of dreamwork is not to take the ego into the dreamworld. We need to bring the dream images into our conscious awareness and waking life. Since the dream state arises from beyond the ego, anything can happen, and natural laws of physical reality do not apply. Unbounded by any physical limits and laws, dream realities broaden awareness so that we can begin to experience our full range of humanness. Virtually anything is possible in the dream reality -- death, rebirth, time travel, out-of-body journeys, enhanced physical or mental powers, even extraordinary effects like healing and balancing. Yet, there is a voice in most of us that wants to discount the dream experience as a less important, inconsequential reality than our waking experience.
For example, a parent tells a child, "Go back to sleep; it was only a dream!", after the child has just awakened from a terrifying dream and still experiences the physiological consequences, which are very real. Disregarding the nightmare is one way to ignore the power of the dream as if it did not have impact or validity in the conscious awareness and experience of the child. The truth is that the experience of a nightmare is just as threatening and dreadful as any waking situation that evokes extreme fear and bodily contraction. In fact, the nightmare may usher in an even stiffer fright because it may be drawing on the fantastic and other-worldly aspects of the psyche. What is important to observe is that, in both cases, the fear experience causes bodily feelings and reactions.
Our natural reaction to a fearful situation like a nightmare is to turn away and avoid the experience entirely. This avoidance (a version of "out of sight, out of mind") sets our system off-balance and triggers the fight/flight syndrome. To re-establish the balance and harmony, it is usually necessary to stop avoiding the fear and turn around and move toward it, accepting it and owning it as a valid part of our reality. The monsters of our dreams are only alienated parts of ourselves, vying for attention. If we can embrace the fear, we no longer need to run away, and we can experience the peace that comes from having "let go" of the fear. Pain, either physical or emotional, is a marker that indicates where healing is needed within us; but we usually surround our pain with fear to protect us from experiencing it.
The fear is usually a base for our anger, or any of the other numerous denial and avoidance strategies we use. The nightmare makes us a gift of the fear and its underlying pain. It leads us to the inner places that need healing, and provides the healing as we experience expansion within of our "stuck", blocked, lifeless parts. At the heart of our approach is the notion that because dreams affect us on our primary experience level -- the body -- and can stir intense multi-sensual feelings and reactions in us, dreams can be used to enter a bodily place of dis-ease and restore the natural flow and balance to that place. In honoring the dream we draw from the ancient healing tradition of the past, and the best of modern psychotherapeutic technique.
The ancient word for therapy, therapeuin, originally meant "service to the gods." In this case therapy facilitates the healing process of the Greek god Asklepios. He was god of both dreams and healing. The content of the dreams -- the characters, the inanimate objects, the activities, the feelings, the colors -- can all be doorways into the infinite inner territory of our myriad inner selves. They are states of consciousness that facilitate healing on mental, physical and spiritual levels. If we can go deeply into the experience of a dream such as the nightmare, for example, we can bring a healing to the dis-ease that caused the nightmare.
Dreams and nightmares are a unique way to move our awareness into our inner feelings and bodily places of flow and blockage. With a remembered dream, we already have in our grasp a good start at an inner resolution of the process. Borrowing from C.G. Jung, we propose the idea that dream symbols arise from the psychic energies that create us and bind us together with all other life forces, the collective unconscious.
However, moving beyond analytical and interpretive methods of treating dreams, it is possible for us to experience directly the timeless and dimensionless primal force that creates dreams. To do so we have to use dreamhealing to travel beyond the symbols to their very source. We call these experiences dream journeys, in the old shamanic sense. The therapist functions as a guide to take the client deeper than the surface symbolism. Symbols are merely a means of capturing our attention -- of attracting, appeasing, or scarring our ego's conscious waking awareness.
Any illness or disease, as the name itself suggests, has at its source a state of dis-ease or out-of-balance energies. Like the shamans of old, Jung noted that the onset of any serious disease was reflected in dreamlife. In addition to leading to the source of our dis-ease, dreams and nightmares also have within them the potential for expansive experiences which can heal and bring us back to a state of balance and health. They are both diagnostic and prescriptive, in that sense. They reveal both problem and solution, if we only learn how to attend to their clarion call. On the surface and analytical level, dream symbols usually relate to the ego's particular concerns.
Some "big dreams" carry a more mysterious, archetypal or collective value. However, each symbol is actually of equal value. They are doorways opening into the formless, chaotic energy underneath it which gave rise to it. Interpreting the symbol gives us a more detailed description and picture of the doorway, but does not give us the experience of going beyond that doorway and exploring experientially what is on the other side over the threshold in those primal energies. Dreamhealing centers around the idea that by going into and then past the experience of the symbols, we can experience the consciousness that created them. This creative state is a source of healing and re-creation. Some symbols offer access to memories of the past, some reveal future events, others can lead us to our inner healer -- the part of us that can provide the energy we need to restore balance and harmony within ourselves.
Much work has been done lately with imagery and healing, usually importing symbols or images into the client's visualization. The healing tale or teaching tale is used in both spiritual and secular counseling. The "imported metaphor" is part of the stock-in-trade repertoire of Ericksonian hypnosis. The results are inherently stronger when the individual produces their own imagery while the therapist unobtrusively helps the client avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgent fantasy. T
he client is guided to stick with the metaphors that arise from within to describe what his state of being and experience is like. You can experiment with this yourself, simply by asking yourself a few simple questions: What would you like to have happen? When it isn't happening, how do you know its not? And where do you feel that in your body? And what's it like? By this means you create your own metaphor for your personal experience, whether it comes from dreamlife or some problem, or a childhood trauma.
The therapist functions solely as a guide to the inner realms, since it is familiar territory to the practitioner. We can use the well-known map analogy, noting that the map can only be a partial representation or symbol of the actual terrain. For example, looking at any map of the countryside we can see lines that mark rivers, hills, and other topological features; however, to walk through an actual old growth forest with a compass, climb the hills and pitch camp under the protective canopy of the trees, and listen to one of those rivers imprints a much deeper impression of the forest than the map ever could. It is a full experience of what is behind the map.
Trying to experience the terrain through the map is like interpreting the symbol, while the experience of going into and beyond the symbols is as ever-changing and alive as an excursion deep into the forest and the mysteries of nature. Another example of the distinction is the difference between reading a recipe and tasting the dish. The savor certainly isn't the same. A dream guide, like a river guide, takes the person through the turbulent (chaotic) waters of the psyche, past the rocks and boulders of their fear, to find the safe passage where the river flows easily into the calm beyond the rapids. The therapist's approach evolves in the moment to keep pace with the flow of the client's process deep in the heart of the dream. Consequently, the client has an active part in the healing process and learns psychological self-care. Flowing with the experience through the progression of multi-sensory images provides the pathway to healing. The experience of finding an inner healing state is invaluable, as it teaches firsthand that the healer is within.
The outer healers are only representations or mirrors of what is already inside. The healing process and myth are deeply engrained in our lives, as individuals and societies. Each culture evolves its own variations on health and disease, and those able to aid in recovery from physical and mental distress. The problem with the old western healing paradigm is that the perception is that healing comes from without. In our culture now we are developing many alternatives to mechanistic medical and psychological practices. One of those alternatives is awareness of personal mythology. Jung suggested that each individual life is based on a particular myth. By discovering that myth, we can live it consciously and adapt ourselves to our destiny, thus harmonizing inner and outer experience, and allowing our true individuality to emerge.
But mythic living doesn't necessarily mean living one myth, since the patterns of all god/dess forms are within us. The myth does not provide us with a blueprint for daily living concerning what we should or ought to do. Instead, it helps us in the process of discovering who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. They spark our sense of discovery and urge us to question and go deeper. There is a chaotic assortment of mythical images within each of us, but sometimes certain themes emerge and assert their priority on a life. So, an individual life seems to strongly parallel a specific myth theme. One way this can manifest is through an uncanny series of synchronistic events, wherein a particular myth becomes the paradigmatic model of a life. The quest for actualization of this myth motivates a variation on the age-old journey of the hero. What's New with My Subject? In ancient Greece, if you wanted to ensure success in some undertaking you invoked the god who oversaw your particular endeavor with prayers and offerings.
As stated before, Asklepios was the Greek god of healing and dream. He was the son of Apollo and the mortal Coronis who was slain by Apollo for infidelity before the child was born. Taken prematurely from his mother, Asklepios was raised by the centaur Chiron, who was a master of the healing arts. Asklepios was an able student who soon surpassed his teacher and incurred both the wrath and blessings of the various gods and goddesses. To protect him from these whims, Zeus immortalized him as the Divine Healer. An entire healing tradition developed in ancient Greece based on this myth. The medical physicians became known as Asklepiads; however, the Asklepian dream healing temple was the place to go if their medicines and treatments failed.
At the Asklepian temple, the god himself visited mortals in their dreams to bring Divine healing. At the temple, Asklepian priests oversaw the rites and procedures which brought the sick mortal into direct contact with the god. These temples were located at great distances from the cities and populated areas in Greece so that to reach one a pilgrimage was necessary. Having arrived at the temple, one was received by the temple priests who began the sometimes lengthy process of determining whether or not the god had summoned one for healing. The priests did have a therapeutic function in the temple, but they were not in any way therapists, nor did they interpret any of the supplicant's dreams.
The priests determined whether or not one had been summoned by Asklepios by making discreet inquiries about the god's appearance in their dreamlife. An appearance by the god signified that one had indeed been invited and was ready to enter the temple. The form which Asklepios assumed in dreams was either a snake, or less commonly a dog (or wolf). The next steps of bodily and mind purification were begun. Another interview with a priest was held because it was recognized that unless a person was conscious and accepting of his present life condition he could not expect a healing from the god. After the interview, the patient's body went through cleansing in the springs or streams around which the temples were always constructed. And at last, the supplicant was prepared to approach the god.
Since Asklepios visited the sick in their dreams, a special chamber, called the abaton (a Greek word meaning "a place not to be entered into uninvited"), was provided where the person would remain alone and asleep. The couch inside where the patient lay was known as the kline. This period of waiting for the god was called the incubation. After dreaming the patient was interviewed by the priests who, without interpreting the dream, would instruct the patient as to whether or not the god had brought the healing. Sometimes many sessions in the abaton on the kline were necessary to come into contact with the god and the sick did not leave the temple until they were healed. As far as interpreting the dream, the belief was that the experience of the dream and not an interpretation was how the healing came to the sick.
The healing was accomplished through the direct intervention of the god himself with the patient's soul through the dream. As a final part of the healing process, a fee was paid to the temple priests as an offering for the ongoing maintenance and work of the Temple. It was said that a failure to do so would result in a relapse of the dis-eased condition. Testimonies were inscribed on the temple walls attesting to the miraculous and powerful healing which went on in the temples, including cures for afflictions like blindness.
In this way the Asklepian dreamhealing went on for hundreds of years. This tradition is continued in dreamhealing. The eight phases of dreamhealing reflect an archetypal healing process. This healing myth is reiterated in the techniques ("ceremonies") of many disciplines. These steps form the real sequence of inner healing no matter what the outer form, including traditional medical practice. These phases include: 1) the pilgrimage; 2) the confession; 3) purification; 4) the offering; 5) dream quest; 6) dreamhealing; 7) work on dreams; 8) re-entry or integration. The entire process is contingent on a healing sanctuary, whether that refuge can be found without or within.
Processing is the principle of assisting an individual to look at his own existence, and improve his ability to confront what he is and where he is for greater adaptability, wholeness, and health.
THE PILGRIMAGE
The pilgrimage satisfies the necessary first step in healing. It is important because one commits one's energies and resources to healing. It is a notice of intent. The outcome of the process is directly proportional to the personal energy put into it, as well as the intent. As in ancient times, the refuge, retreat, or sanctuary is a place where the seeker can devote all of their energy to their dreams and healing without worry about the outer world. That sense of safety is a key factor in healing, because healing is an act of trust. Sanctuary is being in a state of total safety which supports trust. Healing involves pushing past old boundaries and negating old confining belief systems and that too is best done in trust and safety.
Disease is a state of deep inner fear and pain, and it is easier to face fears and pain from a base of safety. Most therapists know this, but generally conceive of it as a pleasant office, confidentiality and being game and script free. But it takes more--a deep respect and honoring of the natural healing process from within, rather than egotistically claiming to be "the healer." This is why we jokingly call Doctors -- M.D.s -- "Minor Deities."
Dreams and visions seem so fragile, so whimsical, and insubstantial in our pragmatic, materially oriented society. When the substantial and concrete is valued more than the mystical and insubstantial it is more difficult to validate one's own inner life. This is perhaps one reason the retreats were located a distance from any city. To live and survive in the civilized world requires a well-structured, strong ego and intellect just to deal with its technological complexity and its threat to our sense of self.
But the ego, in defending itself often feels and acts directly opposite to our deeper wisdom. In a word, we go against ourselves, a case of ego vs. higher self. This creates a state of tension or dis-ease which eventually manifests throughout our whole organism as mental and physical diseases that assume the shape of this inner conflict. For example, most of us have a deep and basic fear and unease over how we are impacting our planet's ecosystems. We may or may not be aware of it, depending on our vested interests and whether or not we identify as environmentalists, but it is there. Yet, in our daily battle to survive we burn fossil fuel driving to work in automobiles that deplete resources and generate pollution. We support hundreds of other activities daily that similarly degenerate the ecosystem. This deeply distresses, puts part of us out of ease with ourselves. We are torn in opposite directions by the pulls of our survival instincts. It may be out of our awareness but we are distressed by it.
Similarly, a person may continue to smoke cigarettes fully aware of the building health risks incurred. The fear of cancer may remain subconscious, but it exists, nevertheless. Most degenerative diseases reflect this state of distress. Degenerative is also a word that characterizes what is happening to the ecosystem. For example, cancer is both a symbol and a physical manifestation of our existential conflict. We could describe cancer as living cells in a state of uncontrollable growth destroying their host organism. This is a perfect metaphor for our relationship as a species to the ecosystem. Aerial photographs of cities bear a remarkable likeness to photographs of microscope slides of cancer cells.
The outer disease assumes the shape of the inner state of dis-ease. Nature and wilderness, however, invite flow and merging of the spirit and soul with the ego. Nature's threats are not to the ego or self alone, but to the entire organism. They require instinctual or intuitive responses involving the whole organism. This allows the ego self and the deeper instinctual self to cooperate in a dynamic balance and that fosters ease. That, plus the beauty and serenity of wilderness, takes us back to our grounding-founding state. Nothing has the ability to return harmony to soul and ego so readily as nature. The nature-mystic experience is one of the most easily accessed non-ordinary states. Untainted wilderness is possibly one of the least realized yet most valuable healing resources that we have. Water, in particular, was important to the dream temples, and there was always a healing spring within the precinct.
THE CONFESSION
The confession helps you target where in your life you have missed the mark. The word "sin" is simply an old Greek archery term (hamartia) for "missing the mark." So if you miss, you simply try again. This self-analysis goes beyond an intellectual review of wrongs, shoulds and ought-tos. It is a special form of in-sight. It signifies attention is turning inward, and becoming reflective.
Dreamhealing begins with the premise that each feature of the dream is a part of the dreamer. One can enter a symbol and speak as if one were that symbol and learn a lot about perspectives other than the ego. It is a way to experience the multiplicity of consciousness within each of us. Many ego parts exist in states of conflict or dis-ease with each other, and by experiencing or becoming the symbols in a dream, and exploring the relationships among them, one eventually can resolve, or move beyond the rifts to a 'gestalt' or inner merging. This signifies the unification of conflicting parts into a state of wholeness or integrity. This is a very healing experience for the ego.
Occasionally in Gestalt dreamwork, the therapist-client team slips past the experience of the symbol to some deeper state of consciousness. These are confusing initially, because they don't compute with traditional training or experience, but they are intriguing. If you merely forage deeper into the dreams, following the dream symbols through and beyond the surface features, they function as doorways into profound states of consciousness, very healing states of consciousness. There are apparently extremely powerful energies or forces within dreams. Just getting to them and experiencing them leads to profound healings. What is really amazing is that they seem to have effects on physical levels, resulting in physical as well as mental restructuring of self image. Perhaps someday we can devise experiments to track these processes with biofeedback. It may eventually become possible to monitor physiology and feedback the unique pattern of mental and physical states that promote healing on an individualized level.
The confession is an extremely important part of the healing and letting-go process. The Asklepians believed that you couldn't be healed or visited by the god Asklepios until you were at ease with your own soul. Paralleling that practice, the confessional during a retreat is more a case of exploring the state of disease at many levels and from many perspectives. It usually ends up looking more like psychotherapy. The physical and emotional diseases reflect or manifest inner states of dis-ease between ego-personal self and the deeper soul-self, or among the separate parts of the ego. Identifying these out-of-ease states is the purpose of the psychotherapy-like confessional. It is a process of becoming more aware of and intimately acquainted with the disease and one's relationship to it on a very personal level.
Harking back to the meaning of sin as simply missing the mark, you have missed where you have sinned. So if you sin, try again with another arrow to reach your target. This is a closed-loop feedback system. It is important for the individual to actually hear their own voice identifying the problem area. Another aspect of a psychotherapeutic confessional is that you also have the opportunity to declare and validate out loud, to yourself and others, what you have done right. Often in life this simple validation is unavailable or overlooked. We all need a pat on the back once in a while for our growth and well being. Willingly taking time to self-reflect on one's positive and negative aspects promotes being honest with yourself. It implies taking personal responsibility in the sense of recognizing your personal ability to respond.
The dream guide functions in a manner similar to that of the ancient dream priest who oversaw the dream temples. A guide helps you make a trip through unfamiliar territory. They help you prepare for the trip and guide you to the best routes, but they don't take the trip for you -- they just provide the guidance. The therapist's role, like the shaman of old, is to lead people on journeys deep into the unfamiliar terrain of the self and to the balancing states of consciousness that ease or heal. This is likely what the dream priests did. The word "priest" had different connotations to the Greeks than us. The role of the Asklepian priest was to prepare, and guide the seekers to meet the healing god in the dream. They don't claim to be, or to speak for (channel), or interpret (analyst) the god. They simply guide each individual to their own personal encounter.
PURIFICATION
Purification prior to entry into sacred ground or sacred space has always been a priority in all forms of magic. And, make no mistake, the ancient technique was a form of magic with its own protocols. Today we can use a sweatlodge or sauna to purify through sweat and heat, a spa for water purification, and a healthy diet of natural foods. Most of these are easily available. If dreamhealing is used in a traditional setting, the client may take a ritual bath, perhaps with herbs, before arriving for the session. It is a symbolic gesture of intent, and sets the tone that one is on a sacred mission with a higher aim in mind.
Both purification and confession imply relieving oneself of sin. These practices also help reduce the stress of modern life. Purification of mind and spirit can be an important symbolic part of the process, preparing one for transformative challenge and change. When it comes to purifying the body, the cleansing needs to be literal. Most people's bodies are filled with poisons, pesticides, preservatives and other anti-life chemicals in food. Nearly all meat is full of steroids and antibiotics, and even amphetamine residues used in chicken-raising. A more natural diet cleans up the body chemistry. As you truly come to love yourself, you desire only the best for yourself both inside as well as outside.
Some people use exercise, music, or drumming, and dancing partly as catharsis to clear out old emotional baggage. What is most important is not the form of the purification but letting the creative process flow to take whatever form is appropriate for the individual.
THE OFFERING
The dreamhealing offering may also take many forms. The most surface level, of course, involves dealing with paying fees for your therapeutic sanctuary. It has ever been so, since the days of the temples. In fact, the Greeks believed that stinting on this offering could jeopardize the healing. Ceremonial offerings invoke a deeper and more personal commitment. Sometimes we create a more formal personal offering ceremony for individuals on retreat. But the offering happens at many levels, ceremonial or not.
During a ceremony, the seeker at some point is asked to offer something of themselves to help induce a healing dream. It is another personal energy commitment to healing, like the pilgrimage. For example, one might offer to devote time to working with the homeless, or commit to picking up three pieces of litter everyday, or some other form of community service. This offering is committing to give some form of service beyond one's self for the collective good. The offering places even more value on the healing. It helps satisfy or ease the soul-ego conflicts. Further, following through on the offering puts ongoing energy into the healing process to prevent the dis-ease creeping back. Healing is a mind or mindful journey and so you have to help the mind to prepare and execute it. The offering helps invoke that state of mind.
DREAM QUEST
A "dream journey" uses the mind, in the broader concept of mind, to enter one's healing states. States of mind or consciousness can manifest, for example, as the "placebo effect" in medical terminology -- or in the evangelist's terms, faith healing. It is a journey to our ultimate creative state of mind which is the source of our dreams and imagination. If you are so minded you might even consider this state to be "the Creator," "Higher Power," or "God force" within. In Jungian terms it would mean an experience of the healing power of the Self. Healing is an act of creation, and that part of us, our creative spirit or the god within, speaks most vividly through dreams and imagination.
Even Einstein considered imagination more important than knowledge. It is not an anti-scientific approach to dream. A dream is a mystical expression of imagination and creative mind which is what ritual and ceremony help invoke. There is safety in ritual and ceremony--secureness in it. It is another symbolic act of commitment to an inner faith. Ceremony by-passes the mind or intellect; it boggles it. It is a way of opening to a state of grace or faith, and these are integral aspects of mystical healing. Ceremony reminds you of something you already have within you, but don't usually notice. It brings it to surface awareness.
Because ceremonies are not rational, they confuse the rational mind. They appeal to the senses and take us outside of our usual ego experiences and beyond the experience of the rational or intellectual ego mind. This is where you find these healing states of consciousness, beyond the rational ego mind, in the mystic. Any time you turn your attention within and become receptive to yourself you enter a whole new world of experience, which is just as real in effects as the outer world. You can facilitate change within yourself and cooperate with your personal growth or evolution. The only problem is getting around the habitual ego identity with its resistances to change. Many techniques of hypnotherapy have been used for years to accomplish this.
One of the more famous, the "confusion" technique was popularized by therapist Milton Erickson, a pioneer in modern hypnotic therapy. Any momentary disequilibrium of either the mind or body can induce a trance state which by-passes the conscious censoring ego and creates receptivity in the subconscious. The ego mind is formed from the sum accumulation of our life's experiences and our reactions to them. It sets the limits or boundaries of our usual thing-feeling-behaving patterns.
Based on our experiences, at deep levels of mind we form multi-sensory images of self and world -- images that capture their essence and shape our belief systems which in turn shape our ego and personality. Not only do these primal sensory energy images and beliefs limits us, they also contain the "psychic" distortions which form the nuclei of our dis-eases. This structure is the ego-mind. It is limited, but what lies beyond is infinite mind or consciousness. It is our source of energy for re-imagining ourselves and healing.
New or unfamiliar experiences, irrational ones like ancient dream rituals that don't compute or match with your normal experiences cause confusion and disorientation in the ego-mind, and can even turn it off. In fact, most of the techniques used in dream guiding are based on fooling this part of the mind. In ceremony, the ego either automatically or voluntarily steps aside and becomes willing to relinquish its fantasy of "control." It becomes more vulnerable and open, particularly if the environment is safe and supportive.
This is when the deep wisdom, the collective infinite consciousness tapped into through dreams and visions helps transform the old beliefs and images into more ease-ful, less limiting ones. Then one opens to free and easy states of mind. A healing retreat creates a different world image, one in which the inner mystical experiences, dreams and visions, are held to be equally, if not more important than outer processes.
With sanctuary one is free to explore them -- the permission is there in the environment. Virtually all religious traditions throughout recorded history held that the deities communicated with mortals through dreams and visions. Yet, direct communication with deity is a new, unsettling thought for many people. These experiences are neither encouraged nor allowed in our culture by its healing and religious institutions.
DREAMHEALING
Healing doesn't happen with a one or two time workshop, nor will one dream accomplish it entirely. Great progress comes in the initial stages occasionally, but it is not probable and most likely will only be symptomatic healing. Deep healing or restructuring takes a full commitment of self, time, and energy. Most disease has taken years, perhaps a lifetime to develop and permeate all levels of our organism. By the time it takes on physical or emotional symptoms, it has been around for awhile and involves the whole person and most of their life patterns. There is a momentum to each life and that is not usually changed overnight. It might not take three months, or it may take longer.
Still, a retreat gives a person time and sanctuary and a better chance to explore themselves thoroughly to make deep physical and mental changes, to change the momentum. In ancient Greece, the dream priest would look for a sign of the god in dreams. If they saw a sign of the god, then that was a sign that the healing had already occurred. Then you simply paid your fee for the upkeep of the temple, and left. As therapists, we can't say, "Oh, there is a snake in your dream--you've been healed--see you later." The ancient healings may have been conducted in this manner, but it is not necessarily enough for the modern ego, because it is a surrender of personal power to an external force which only visits in certain dreams.
Dreamhealing participants learn to realize that they are really the power behind their healing, not the therapist. That is much more empowering, and real healing is an empowering process, an opportunity for personal evolution. Knowledge of self-healing capacities goes back over the millennia. That is a fundamental way dreamhealing differs from the ancient technique, or for that matter, most modern medical or new age healing practice. Common to shamanism, psychology, and the medical approaches are their implications that the healing power is outside of the person seeking healing. Somehow it is the doctor or his medicines and techniques, the shaman or the God -- someone, something, or somepower outside of the self who provides the healing. That disempowers.
WORK ON DREAMS
Bringing the awareness or senses of the inner healing process from the dream into the conscious or rational mind, which is what a dream journey does, helps us to realize the healing in the outer world also. It draws the ego-mind into a partnership of cooperation to make outer changes in lifestyle and behavior that compliment or support the inner ones. The individual is empowered and takes a more active -- pro-active -- role. The pattern is learn, commit, do. Dream therapy often triggers surprising changes in life patterns without intellectual awareness of how the change of attitude occurs.
For example, some dreamhealing participants find they are simply unable to eat certain foods, or lose the desire to smoke after a dream session, even though the work didn't touch on that at all. It often takes the mind weeks or months to finally understand the depths and changes in personal dynamics that the dream therapy initiates. But it is still an inner process. We could describe it as intellect catching up to wisdom. So, dreamhealing incorporates and expands on Asklepian dreamhealing. It was not derived from or contrived to fit this archetypal model. It emerges spontaneously, reiterating the same themes, loud and clear. It is a new paradigm for healing, a model that incorporates the old but only as part. It integrates science and mysticism yielding a view beyond the capabilities of either system alone. Dreams themselves, as the long-forgotten healers, do this.
From the scientific side, there has been much research and acknowledgment that dreams are necessary to health. They are believed to exert a balancing effect, and without them we soon show signs of mental and physical deterioration. For example, studies have shown that sleep deprivation within days results in extreme nervousness and anxiety, hallucinations, or delusions.
Freud, Jung, and Fritz Perls were among the earliest contemporary scientists who recognized the healing potential in dreams and used them as therapeutic tools, but they did so more from the superficial ego and interpretive levels. Jung hinted at much deeper aspects of dreams, but still remained interpretive in his dream therapy. Perls recognized that it was the experiences in the dream that were healing, but limited it to the ego. Most "in depth" psychotherapies include dream therapy. And, of course, from the mystical perspective dreams come from the deities, and give us the gifts of prophecy, wisdom, and their unique perspective. By and large, dreams are the forgotten healer. When healing is needed, very few people think of turning to their dreams.
RE-ENTRY
Dreams provide a missing feminine element as contrasted with the characteristically masculine approach in the medical healing model. It is an intuitive one where the person needing healing is acted on from the outside by therapists, chemicals, surgery, or technology. Dreams, on the other hand, are a personal inner healing, a non-intrusive one that arises from within, a creative healing of faith. Modern medicine is practiced in bright lights and technically outfitted hospitals. Dreams are the night's creations from the soul and sleep. The contrast is that of a masculine quality, with a feminine quality. This doesn't mean dreams should necessarily replace allopathic healing; they provide a balance and wholeness it is missing -- the yin and yang complementing the whole. It is a marriage between dreamhealing and medical science that seems most appropriate. Dream therapy in hospitals might speed recovery rates from surgery and other medical techniques and treatments. It would certainly empower patients with a sense of personal and deep participation in the healing process.
For the skeptic, who wonders how ancient practices like Aesculapian mythology could play a role in our lives today, we suggest an open-mindedness about dreams. We can learn from them without having to become "true believers." A new paradigm for healing has to incorporate all the models, but not be bound or limited to them. This includes the old and new medical technology, psychology, Aesculapian dreamhealing, shamanism, and anything else with something to offer. But it needs to be much more than just the sum of all of them. The old models are incomplete and inadequate, too limited and narrowly focused. They are entrenched in dogma and habitual ways of viewing reality, and the patient.
Contemporary medical or psychological therapies, perhaps even more so than the ancient practices, are biased belief systems. Immediate change is imperative because, for starters, we need to heal our species' relationship with its environment. It is one of dis-ease. None of the old models motivates us or shows us how to heal it--creativity will be required. Healers cannot just focus on only healing parts of the individual any more, the issues are much broader. The survival of our species is at stake.