Imagine your waking self without the responsibility of looking after the physical body and all its needs. That’s your dreaming self. There’s no reason to fear or to ignore the dreaming self. It’s one source of learning and self-understanding, one way of connecting to the higher power, however we define it—God, Goddess, Allah, Brahma, Universal Love, the Life Force. I even knew a minister who called that power Skippy.
Dreaming may be considered not so much a psychic activity as a different framework for the mind. When we’re asleep, we suspend many of our mental blocks. Our inner critic sleeps, the one that pesters us with thoughts that we’ve been stupid or rude or incompetent. In dreams, our creative mind can come out to play.
The dreaming self acts as our gatekeeper to the wider universe. I believe that the knowledge and love of the Higher Power flows through the dreaming self to the waking self. The best attitude is not one of awe but of appreciation. Just as our physical body gets us around in the physical world, our dreaming self gets us around the imaginal realm.
The openness of the dreaming self allows many different types of experiences to happen besides precognition, problem solving, or personality analysis. Encounters with dead loved ones pepper the literature.
Hello from Heaven by Bill and Judy Guggenheim describes visits from the departed to grieving loved ones. The messages, often in dreams, contain words of comfort, such as “I’m okay, I’m in a beautiful place. Stop grieving and go on with your life. I love you.” These are sentiments we all need to hear from those we’ve lost.
Patricia Garfield has codified many encounters in The Dream Messenger. In her view, whether one can prove the actual visit from the other world or not, there’s no denying its impact. Dreamers remember details for a long time, and the experience often makes a profound difference in their beliefs. That definitely describes the dream I had about my grandmother and uncle.
On the other hand, many people experience frightening or sad dreams about their departed loved ones. Often the dead seem even sicker, suffer more, or die more horribly. It’s normal in the grieving process to initially have such dreams then get past them.
What can we do about nightmares or other troublesome dreams? Turn and face them, fearlessly and with humor. The mind creates nightmarish elements like hands strangling or tigers chasing. We can make the threatening images do whatever we want if we just stand up to them. That takes some work, but it’s certainly possible. Dream work becomes more effective if we develop lucidity, conscious awareness while maintaining the dream state.
Excerpted from Out of the Psychic Closet: The Quest to Trust My True Nature. The book is available in Kindle, e-book, and paperback at Amazon.com, bn.com, and the publisher, TwilightTimesBooks.com.
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Book Recommendation for The Things They Carried
I just finished The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. It was an odd reading choice for me because I've never been a fan of war stories or of war, for that matter. Still, it would be inappropriate for me to present myself as a pacifist. I believe in peace but I know there's no such thing as a good story or an interesting life without tension and conflict. People go to war because they can't figure out a way to resolve their conflicts otherwise. I believe this is the reason we come into incarnation, to learn that process. Earth is a school.
The Things They Carried turned out to be a remarkable book. I read it because I knew the author wrote it as an exploration of memory, writing fiction in first person in a nonfictional voice, using himself as a character, a fascinating undertaking. O'Brien does not disappoint, far from it. I identified with his emotions in war, not as if I had participated in it myself but through my own life experiences. He doesn't call them psychic experiences, but they are.
He tells of wrapping dead bodies and strapping them to helicopters. That reminds him of the first time the death of someone traumatized him. Whether fiction or non, he tells of the death of his little girlfriend who died of a brain tumor when they were both nine. Then she came to him in dreams, dreams he learned to intend before falling asleep, where they played, talked, and carried on their friendship. I couldn't help recalling when I was seven because my best friend died in a car wreck. Two months later she leaned over a cloud and talked to me in waking life, an event that helped shape my beliefs about possibilities.
During another grueling experience in my life, a divorce, I found my consciousness floating outside my body. I often had the feeling that my spirit might just slip out and leave my body. I feared I would simply abandon it and not return; but because I was so distraught, sometimes I feared I wouldn't and would have to stay. O'Brien, the character, experiences the same angst when in a battle or performing some of the hateful duties of a soldier. His consciousness seems to leave his body.
O'Brien, the author, invokes the familiar aspects of the Viet Nam War that we all recognize from news reports, movies, and books as well as the portrayal of post-traumatic stress syndrome, the psychological condition that exemplified the conflict. He invokes in an original way through a personal exploration of memory, what's real and what isn't, but also what could have been. He toys with erasing memories, a cleverly appealing outcome for negative ones. His conclusions apply not only to memories of war but also to all our life experiences. His use of magical realism, a valuable technique I rely on it my own writing, adds verisimilitude to his conclusions.
The Things They Carried speaks to us all. I recommend it with gusto.
The Things They Carried turned out to be a remarkable book. I read it because I knew the author wrote it as an exploration of memory, writing fiction in first person in a nonfictional voice, using himself as a character, a fascinating undertaking. O'Brien does not disappoint, far from it. I identified with his emotions in war, not as if I had participated in it myself but through my own life experiences. He doesn't call them psychic experiences, but they are.
He tells of wrapping dead bodies and strapping them to helicopters. That reminds him of the first time the death of someone traumatized him. Whether fiction or non, he tells of the death of his little girlfriend who died of a brain tumor when they were both nine. Then she came to him in dreams, dreams he learned to intend before falling asleep, where they played, talked, and carried on their friendship. I couldn't help recalling when I was seven because my best friend died in a car wreck. Two months later she leaned over a cloud and talked to me in waking life, an event that helped shape my beliefs about possibilities.
During another grueling experience in my life, a divorce, I found my consciousness floating outside my body. I often had the feeling that my spirit might just slip out and leave my body. I feared I would simply abandon it and not return; but because I was so distraught, sometimes I feared I wouldn't and would have to stay. O'Brien, the character, experiences the same angst when in a battle or performing some of the hateful duties of a soldier. His consciousness seems to leave his body.
O'Brien, the author, invokes the familiar aspects of the Viet Nam War that we all recognize from news reports, movies, and books as well as the portrayal of post-traumatic stress syndrome, the psychological condition that exemplified the conflict. He invokes in an original way through a personal exploration of memory, what's real and what isn't, but also what could have been. He toys with erasing memories, a cleverly appealing outcome for negative ones. His conclusions apply not only to memories of war but also to all our life experiences. His use of magical realism, a valuable technique I rely on it my own writing, adds verisimilitude to his conclusions.
The Things They Carried speaks to us all. I recommend it with gusto.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Women of Wisdom Foreword by Jean Houston
Foreword by Jean Houston
Women of Wisdom is in the forefront of the biggest change in human history – the only change that will assure our continuity as a species. Those who organize and participate in the Women of Wisdom experience know that for a new world to be born we have to bring a new mind to bear. Critical to this is the rich mind style of women that has been gestating in the womb of preparatory time, lo, these many millennia. In their ebullient and evocative conferences WOW demonstrates a tremendous change in who we are and how we do things.Playing their part to usher in feminine mind, WOW emphasizes process rather than just product, and making things cohere, relate, and grow. Cultures in which the feminine archetype is powerful are almost always non-heroic; they tend to make things work together, each piece has its part to play. The feminine principle expresses itself as an unfolding of levels of existence, not as conquest of facts. The relationships between people and things become more important than final outcome. The world within becomes as important as the world outside.In each and every WOW conference women discover ways to manifest this consciousness, embrace their power, challenge the way things are done, and build a new social order. They learn how women are more geared to team building and leading enterprises through natural growth stages.The conferences demonstrate that governance, games, education, work, health – society itself – can be held to a new standard, one that promotes and honors the fullness of who and what we can be rather than just collective rights and liberties. They empower women to challenge the most sexist institutions from the medical establishments to business institutions, and at long last, allow their full creativity to be set free.The women’s movement as a whole, and events such as the Women of Wisdom conference in particular, may be the outward manifestation of what is happening on depth levels in essential, mythic, and archetypal space-time. Whether the women’s movement has evolved because the crisis of the eternal world is calling for the rise of the goddess to restore the balance of nature, or because the release of women into full partnership demands a similar release of its archetypal principle, or even because, in the cosmic cycle of things, the time of the goddess has come around, we cannot say. But all the evidence indicates that the feminine archetype is returning.This is perhaps the most important event of the last five thousand years, and its consequences may well have an immense, unimaginable effect on cultural and ecological evolution.Because its approach is systemic rather than systematic, because it sees things in constellations rather than as discreet and disconnected facts, the feminine mind view is supremely concerned with the networking of the individual with the larger social organism. This is most important as we try and create a planetary society with deepening of individual cultures.As I have had the opportunity to talk with many of the participants at these conferences I am moved to celebration and gratitude for what these remarkable women have done and how they have served in the creation of this new society.--Jean Houston, PhD
Women of Wisdom by Kris Steinnes, is a book that deals with this and other important issues. It is being offered beginning on June 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 am. We invite you to go to this page - www.wisewomanpublishing.com/womenofwisdom.html - to access the order page and then go back to this page to access the bonus page. On the Exclusive Private Invite page, enter your order confirmation code. That will allow you to gain entry to the bonus gifts that are available to people who buy the book on June 23rd.
Women of Wisdom is in the forefront of the biggest change in human history – the only change that will assure our continuity as a species. Those who organize and participate in the Women of Wisdom experience know that for a new world to be born we have to bring a new mind to bear. Critical to this is the rich mind style of women that has been gestating in the womb of preparatory time, lo, these many millennia. In their ebullient and evocative conferences WOW demonstrates a tremendous change in who we are and how we do things.Playing their part to usher in feminine mind, WOW emphasizes process rather than just product, and making things cohere, relate, and grow. Cultures in which the feminine archetype is powerful are almost always non-heroic; they tend to make things work together, each piece has its part to play. The feminine principle expresses itself as an unfolding of levels of existence, not as conquest of facts. The relationships between people and things become more important than final outcome. The world within becomes as important as the world outside.In each and every WOW conference women discover ways to manifest this consciousness, embrace their power, challenge the way things are done, and build a new social order. They learn how women are more geared to team building and leading enterprises through natural growth stages.The conferences demonstrate that governance, games, education, work, health – society itself – can be held to a new standard, one that promotes and honors the fullness of who and what we can be rather than just collective rights and liberties. They empower women to challenge the most sexist institutions from the medical establishments to business institutions, and at long last, allow their full creativity to be set free.The women’s movement as a whole, and events such as the Women of Wisdom conference in particular, may be the outward manifestation of what is happening on depth levels in essential, mythic, and archetypal space-time. Whether the women’s movement has evolved because the crisis of the eternal world is calling for the rise of the goddess to restore the balance of nature, or because the release of women into full partnership demands a similar release of its archetypal principle, or even because, in the cosmic cycle of things, the time of the goddess has come around, we cannot say. But all the evidence indicates that the feminine archetype is returning.This is perhaps the most important event of the last five thousand years, and its consequences may well have an immense, unimaginable effect on cultural and ecological evolution.Because its approach is systemic rather than systematic, because it sees things in constellations rather than as discreet and disconnected facts, the feminine mind view is supremely concerned with the networking of the individual with the larger social organism. This is most important as we try and create a planetary society with deepening of individual cultures.As I have had the opportunity to talk with many of the participants at these conferences I am moved to celebration and gratitude for what these remarkable women have done and how they have served in the creation of this new society.--Jean Houston, PhD
Women of Wisdom by Kris Steinnes, is a book that deals with this and other important issues. It is being offered beginning on June 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 am. We invite you to go to this page - www.wisewomanpublishing.com/womenofwisdom.html - to access the order page and then go back to this page to access the bonus page. On the Exclusive Private Invite page, enter your order confirmation code. That will allow you to gain entry to the bonus gifts that are available to people who buy the book on June 23rd.
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