Sometimes, a story, long or short, spoken or visualized, hits me with such physical force that I find myself overwhelmed by tears. It’s a strange, soulful, connected feeling of love, cleansing, healing, and opening. I can be depressed and closing down in one moment and light and open in the next. I’ve learned to welcome these wrenching tear-filled waves of emotion and invite them in as I feel them approaching my threshold. They release stress and tension that has built up. Their coming seems more magical than random for often I feel drawn to the story that will trigger the effect when I am being particularly harsh upon myself and feeling lost in the darkness of the world.
There are many triggers in life, those that trigger fear, anger, hate, distrust, and sadness. The most powerful trigger for me is one of love and compassion, and of giving and caring. It is in this emotion and acts that create a connection with the world, with its soul, with my true self.
Stories that trigger appear random but often when I look more closely my dream stories seem to trumpet their arrival before I see their need. These dreams intensify and force me to remember them as I awake.
Both waking and sleeping dream stories come to me in the service of healing. It’s a reminder that if I’m open there are stories of love all around and in some of the most unexpected places.
I recently read about a man who after been found guilty of an act of doing bodily harm to another agreed that he had done the act but believed he was justified because he continued to believe that his reason for it was real even though his reason was not real. He quite literally saw what and acted on what he believed and not on what was actually there. Seeing is not always believing because all too often we only see what we believe.
Belief is a powerful filter for the reality we perceive and act upon.
The placebo effect is a good example of this. There are hundreds of studies that have shown people to get well because they were led to believe that the pills, they were taking would cure them when in fact the pills were only sugar and inactive. Their beliefs caused their bodies to correct the problem. That seems to fall under the rubric of magic. People accused of witchcraft casted “spells” that were probably ineffective save the belief of the person who had the spell cast upon them that the spell could hurt them and then fell ill because of it. Shaman often perform rituals that cure or cause changes in behavior or in the functioning of the community because the community or individual believes that these rituals work. There is also the ritual of the lie oft told until the lie is believed to be the truth which is the pervue of all conspiracy theories and dictators control their followers.
Not every belief is conscious. Some are buried deep in our psyches.
“Man is what he believes”
–Anton Chekhov
Our upbringing, what our parents and community told us was true, becomes our reality. But it’s all belief. Fortunately, our brains, our psychology is malleable i.e., our beliefs can change. We can change them, or we can choose to not change them. Beliefs and therefor our reality is created by us. We can change the effects that our biochemistry has upon our bodies and our behavior.
To a great extent this is why most therapies work for they can help us to alter a belief pattern that is not working for us, they can reveal hidden beliefs that have held us back in our lives, and then help us to change them. Once we know that what we believe may not be true or may have another interpretation it is incumbent upon us to change our belief or to at least look closer and question it. We are the ultimate arbiter of our beliefs and the actions we take through them.
Colorized version of engraving by Camille Flammarian L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888)
Mystical experiences seem to come out of nowhere in a process dubbed “transliminality” and come to us, according to Nima Ghorbani et al in an article in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (Nov. 2014)1, in at least two forms i.e., “Introvertive” and “extrovertive Mysticism”. The former “involves consciousness of a timeless and spaceless void” (Ghorbani, N., page 269) and the latter version having the experience of unity with everything.
I’ve already spoken to my experience with the second of these but also on one occasion experienced the first where after a particularly intense activity I felt as though I were falling into a dark hole or well. I could have chosen to stop this experience but seeing that it might be of some value I chose to allow it to continue and found myself totally engulfed in a black featureless void. As I crawled out of this void the fear and anxiety that I had been experiencing prior to this had vanished and I was left with a sense of calm and renewed strength; a feeling that all was well. The overall experience was, as with my other experiences, spiritual and resulted in a great sense of well-being. Though both had a similar effect, I, to be honest, would prefer the extrovertive experience road to enlightenment.
My experiences have been involuntary in their impingement on my consciousness, but I have voluntarily allowed them to manifest rather than to cut them short. Some psychologists have shown that these experiences of transliminality are psychopathological in nature. Others imply that they are tied to religiosity in that the very word “transliminal” means to cross (trans) a threshold (limines) or to put it in religious terms to cross over a threshold to get closer to God i.e., to transcend the ego construct, that which separates us from each other, our true selves, and God. The experience is one of discovering another reality which can be very disconcerting. Thus, these experiences of transliminality may help to transcend the hardened experience of separateness and open one to the experience of oneness.
This is clearly a wonderful experience, but I wouldn’t want to get stuck there in that it would make it impossible to negotiate the everyday (which is part of the definition of psychopathology). I’m satisfied with just knowing that there is something more than my meager self, that there is a greater Self that I can draw on.
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1 Ghorbani, N, et al, Transliminality and Mystical Experience: Common Thread Hypothesis, Religious Commitment, and Psychological Adjustment in Iran, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Vol. 6, Number 4, Nov. 2014, Page 268.
On March 21st of this year, I wrote in a blog titled “Awakening” about some transcendent experiences I’ve had over the years and their effect on me.
“At that time, I experienced a rapid expansion of my awareness of the environment which also took on a very bright and vivid coloration where I did not feel separate from as though an observer but part of, or more precisely a feeling of, “being” the everything. All judgments and critiques vanished and were replaced with a sense of ultimate belonging and acceptance. I was no longer a separate being with all the doubts and self-recriminations, and ego-desires that come with that separateness. When reaching out my hand I no longer had the feeling that I ended at the tip of my fingers but that I was everywhere and everywhere was me. There was also a feeling of great acceptance, belonging, and love. All this left me knowing that there is something much greater than myself and yet in myself of which I am a whole and not a part.”
Today I want to share another experience that fits nicely with the above encounters with the numinous or otherworldly. I attended a workshop some years back where we studied communication, people to people communication of the nonverbal kind. In one activity we paired off facing one another, saying nothing, and just looking into the eyes of the other person. This went on for nearly an hour, though it seemed an eternity in the beginning. After some time, my mind stopped chattering, my uneasiness melted away, and I had the distinct impression of seeing myself through the other person’s eyes. At first this was quite disconcerting but then it turned into something quite wonderful, and I felt very much connected with this stranger that sat before me. When done we were to write down a certain set of fairly innocuous information about each other e.g., name, background, family makeup, education, job, etc. As I read him how I described him through my answers on the list he sat there stunned at how accurate I was as was I when he shared what he had “picked up’ from me.
Somehow, almost by magic, we had communicated information about ourselves that we could not have known before the exercise, so much so that it was uncanny how accurate we were with each other.
We also shared a similar experience of seeing ourselves through the other’s eyes. It was as though we had momentarily become the other and thus knew the others private thoughts.
How could this be? How could we have shared consciousnesses? It was as if those consciousnesses were not locked within our physical body’s aka our heads, i.e., our consciousness. It was some years later that I learned of some studies on the nonlocality of consciousness.1
It has been suggested by some scientists that there is a profound connectedness between all things; an experience I shared in the quote above at the beginning of this post. This nonlocal view suggests a more “relational and connected view of the world”.2
It was Larry Dossey in his book Recovering the Soul (Bantam Books, 1989) who coined the phrase “the nonlocal mind”. In his book he suggested that there is a mode of information communication or nonlocal awareness that transcends the physical senses. Is this what my partner and I experienced all those years ago? And could this add some insight to some of those private awareness’s I experienced as well? Is there another reality and connectedness that we all could share if we could expand our awareness to include something other than the physical and material world? I mean what is it that “experiences” this world but our psyche’s and if we adhere to a rigid definition of what constitutes reality could this limit our experience of it? Can we see what we have trained ourselves to not see by retraining ourselves to a broader and more inclusive view or at least suspend the learned behavior to allow something else to present itself?
I’ve already given a number of hints across a number of blog articles on how to do this or at least how one might increase the chances of doing it. I’ve also written a story about the kind of magic that seems to permeate these kinds of experiences3.
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1 Dossey, L. Spirituality and the Nonlocal Mind. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, Vol.1 No.1, 2014 pgs. 29-42
2 Edge, H. (1997). Spirituality in the Natural and Spiritual Worlds
3 Cole, R.J. (2021) Psyche’s Dream: A Dragon’s Tale
While reading about the lives of Gautama Buddha, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, St. John of the Cross, and Jesus of Nazareth I started to think about their shared experiences of the transcendent. All seemed to have had an experience of oneness, Buddha in a meditation under the Bodhi tree at the end of 49 days, for Rumi it wasn’t an immediate enlightening moment but a process that was a gradual awakening, and for Jesus it seemed to be one of those transcendent ah ha moments during his baptism by John. Saint John of the Cross described the experience as a moment of awakening, “The soul is moved and awakened from the sleep of natural vision to supernatural vision. Hence one very adequately uses the term awakening.”
“9 At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.
–Mark 1:9-10
These reports by all of these notable religious leaders I was reading about are the essence of what I experienced during a meditation at a retreat some years back. It was an experience that then repeated itself in other forms and venues for several years afterward and had me knowing that there was a world much more connected and much greater in scope than I could ever have envisioned prior to the experienced epiphany.
At that time, I experienced a rapid expansion of my awareness of the environment which also took on a very bright and vivid coloration where I did not feel separate from as though an observer but part of, or more precisely a feeling of, “being” the everything. All judgments and critiques vanished and were replaced with a sense of ultimate belonging and acceptance. I was no longer a separate being with all the doubts and self-recriminations, and ego-desires that come with that separateness. When reaching out my hand I no longer had the feeling that I ended at the tip of my fingers but that I was everywhere and everywhere was me. There was also a feeling of great acceptance, belonging, and love. All this left me knowing that there is something much greater than myself and yet in myself of which I am a whole and not a part. *
I call these moments epiphanies, but they are also called mystical experiences, altered states, a transcendent state, or even peak experiences. Because of their transcendent quality many were labeled mystical i.e., divine in nature, but in my case they did not at the time feel divine. ** But for me these also brought with them the great joy, awe, and wonder of a peak experience. Some came through the practice of a meditation of several hours while others seemed to come out of nowhere and unexpectedly while walking down the street. I was, however, at the time involved in a number of personal trainings and studies that were psycho-emotional in nature and some incorporated several aspects of religious ritual. None were induced through any hallucinogenic drug. And they all presented themselves unbidden as if by magic and were totally unexpected.
“Real magic cannot be wielded through the everyday and is very difficult to experience if one is stuck on the idea of being a grown-up. Those who still honor the child within and in the affairs of others will find it much easier to pass through the door and find the magic and enchantment that lies beyond. It’s when you “let go” of your same-old, same-old way of being and drop into the chaos of uncontrolled play that the magical child returns. “
–From Psyche’s Dream: A Dragon’s Tale
Unlike the aforementioned spiritual leaders, the feeling associated with these ah ha moments or the lessons that they taught aren’t always with me and most often I don’t act as though the revelations given me through these moments is real or applicable to my everyday life, and I definitely haven’t risen up to lead people to the promised land, but the “knowing’ is there and often that is enough to continue to make a difference in my life. And this “knowing” has changed permanently my experience of reality and my relationship with it back through the past prior to the experiences and forward to the present.
I also cannot say that I am enlightened though the experiences were enlightening. A definition of being a true enlightened one includes a significant shift in reality so that one is not lost in reality or confused by it because everything is what it is. Though both mystical and enlightened experiences connect one with the ineffableness of God one is a transient experience, though easily recalled, while the other is more permanent in one’s nature and being.
I can say that over time I have lived my life more intentionally and more consciously than I did prior to the experiences. I also live it less selfishly and more aware of others needs and sensibilities, less ego bound and more inclusive (note that I use the word “less” rather than something more absolute like “always”).
I cannot tell anyone how to make these experiences happen other than to live life intentionally, be fully present observing everything, and accepting responsibility for what is presented and how you act on it but even those insights don’t guarantee anything. The experience feels like magic but not the magic of wands, ritual, and incantation. It’s the real magic of the everyday, in the smallest and least significant things and events and being open to them.
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ― Roald Dahl
*According to Pew Research 49% of people in the U.S. have reported having had a mystical experience defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.” The NIH additionally defines it as a “self-reported experience of unity”.
**The four traits of a mystical experience are ineffability (too extreme to be expressed in words), noetic quality (the sense of revelation), transiency (lasting for a short time), passivity (acceptance of what happened). Some people with extreme mystical experience also report a very intense and bright light and sometimes an experience of nothingness.
We, you and I, have both the light and dark side of our natures. We each through the process of acculturation, values development, and personal choice empower one over the other usually by suppressing our dark side by stuffing it into our unconscious or by the forced reinforcing of only light side material. For well over a thousand years western people have violently suppressed the dark side in favor of what was determined to be the light side e.g., the inquisition was an extreme example but there are any number of repressive Christian correlates where certain behaviors were actively suppressed.
Over time, suppressed behaviors fester and like the human cell can become malignant in their expression, growing, oozing, weeping, chafing, and decaying until something sets them free. This is true for individuals, and in the collective of families, villages, and nation states.
Public discourse has for some time been limited to a certain way of being and conversing with each other in private and publicly. Much of this has included the suppression or denial of our emotions and desires. However, as we all know unexpressed emotions or thwarted desires and expectations get darker over time and when finally released can be quite repugnant and violent. Culturally, explosive behaviors have generally been strongly frowned upon, more so for women than men who also had outlets such as the military, sports, and maybe a bar fight or two or once in a while a confrontation at the OK Corral, or a foray into the Crusades. The rest was controlled by cultural values. But as said earlier suppressed material builds up when not dealt with openly i.e., the dark side will not be denied its expression. When wars and too much equality over too short a time span began to erode the controls holding the dark side in check the Dark side was primed for its day in the sun.
When the dark no longer can be contained a champion often comes along to offer the freedom of expression necessary to let off the buildup. Dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot fit the bill nicely. But the West after defending itself against the dark side of these people continued its suppression of its own dark side until along came the Maga’s who gave permission to vileness, negative rhetoric, lying, cheating, oppressing, and barbarous personal attacks, the whole gamut of dark side expression and it was welcomed. But once this Djinn or inner demon was let out of the bottle the light side counterpart did not have the skills to recork what been released and at present there are no Ghost Busters with the power to absorb the evil and put it in its place.
This of course, is not the whole answer because containing i.e., suppressing the dark side is never the answer. What we need to do is to develop the personal skills to deal openly with both sides of our nature and to treat each other with respect and fairness. This will include a retooling of the global economic system to be on a more equitable playing field for everyone and a truly equitable justice system that can’t be gamed by money and tricky lawyers. This will require that we get outside the domination of our ego, that which insists on keeping us separated, and begin to operate in that area of the psyche between the conscious ego and the unconscious, what Jung called the self. It is a place of virtual magic where we no longer depend on rationalization or will power (or drugs and prisons) to suppress fully half our nature but learn to work with both sides from a center between both.
There’s also the magic of dark humor that we all share as a form of release when special groups of people can say outrageous things to each other as a means of releasing pent up stresses. But when these releasing techniques become public they can be misunderstood and further suppressed. The simple though often difficult understanding what they really are and that most of use them from time to time then acknowledging that there’s no intention of acting upon them can do much to release the suppressed pressure. The right side of the political and social spectrum is currently acting as a release valve and has let the Jinn out of the bottle by freely acknowledging the inner demon. How we deal with it as a society will determine whether we survive as our better selves or succumb to our demons.
In short, there is hope for us during this time of anger, exposed hatred, and the threat of social destruction. But only if we deal openly with both sides of ourselves and make the necessary adjustments to the way we deal with each other.
Last night I had a dream about an impending royal marriage where I was the groom but had no idea what I was to do to make this happen. I strutted and pretended and wandered about lost and clueless. As I awoke, I had the thought that this “royal wedding” was a metaphor for the alchemist’s “marriage of opposites” that Karl Jung talked so much about that represented the human process of individuation or becoming whole (more who and what one really is).
In alchemy, the conjunction of opposites i.e., the coming together of what seems like separate and opposing elements that can then give birth to something totally new is often referred to as the “royal marriage.” This marriage was of fundamental concern to the alchemists of old because it was a key to transformation, to personal, social, and perhaps even political evolution.
We are in a crucible of sorts where the political and social right is challenging the political and social left. To each of these opposites the other looks to be the destruction of life as we know it. Chaos is all around us and we experience the pain and heat of the crucible. Can you blame us for wanting to climb out, to go unconscious? We try to make deals with our opposite (if you, then I). We pray to God with some form of “if you intervene, then I’ll believe or I’ll behave in a certain way”. It’s all transactional. But as with Alchemy something old needs to go through the crucible in order to be transformed into something new.
Somewhere in all this struggle and chaos, loudness, fear, good versus less good, and hate is the possibility (promise?) of transformation. Transformation happens when we realize that we have both sides within us. Some of us are thinkers and some of us are feelers. Some are extroverts while others are introverts, rational versus irrational aka head and heart, literal versus soulful, concrete versus flexible, or exclusionary versus inclusionary but none of us are all one way or the other. We all have the potential for our opposite and the willingness to accept these opposites and to work with them, to fuse them within our psyche so to speak, can bring about a new way of being a transformation that reflects a wholeness that is not evident when we insist on maintaining our polarities.
Instead of rigidly defending our own personal way of being we can hold these opposites in the crucible of ourselves and learn to accept the discomfort of their seemingly competing needs. The resulting philosopher’s stone in all this psychological alchemy is a wholeness that very few if any of us experience while living our separated lives.
What we may be experiencing is a change of state being created by the heat and intensity of the social and personal crucible we find ourselves in. Once again we have the opportunity to reveal ourselves as we were meant to be, to grow and transform.
Cars zooming, grass growing, trees reaching for the sky, clouds caressing mountain tops.
Me noticing, them ignoring, me unconscious and too distracted to help another. Giving, taking, caring, indifferent. Believing and unbelieving. Agreeable, affable, and accommodating. Resistant and uncooperative. Other directed, self-centered, open,closed, aggressive, inclusive, and exclusive all.
Loving, hating, self-righteous, and selfless.
An annoying flashing stop sign, what and who I think belongs and what and who I don’t.
What seems evil and what seems good.
Free and not so free, independent, and interdependent, playing, fighting, and loving.
Imagining, creating, foraging, and reproducing. God in all, always present in its “everythingness”, wholeness, and “everywhereness”.
I sit here in this place that always reminds me of what I am, God stuff.
In oneirology or the study of dreams there is a subfield of study called lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is when one becomes aware that they are dreaming while still in the dream. Pretty freaky huh? But that’s not all, one can learn to take some volitional control over the dream once they’ve become aware that they are dreaming.
I’ve had moments when I thought that I was awake when really, I was still in a dream and then took control of the dream but did so thinking that I was actually awake. In these dreams or dream-like states I am aware of myself, aware of the dream meaning enough to want to change it and aware that I could make a decision to change the outcome. These are all necessary conditions for labeling the dream lucid. There’s another condition, that one is aware that they are dreaming. Usually, I become aware just as I’m awaking. This happens in what is known as the hypnopompic1 state. This state is usually associated with hallucinating. So, am I hallucinating that I’m awake or dreaming I’m awake or becoming conscious of my dreaming as I awake?
For me lucid dreaming has not been an intentional practice certainly not as it would be in the Tibetan practice of Dream Yoga or the Hindu practice of Yoga Nidra.
Some researchers suggest that lucid dreamers aren’t really in a sleep state but are in a brief state of wakefulness or what is called “micro-awakening” or that it may be a state of both waking and dreaming. This is more like my experience. I have also had these micro-awakenings, if that’s what they are, during a nightmare which has allowed me to stay in the nightmare and bring it to a more agreeable conclusion.
Research has shown that training people with disorders that include frequent nightmares to use lucid dreaming as a way of controlling the nightmares has helped those with PTSD. Other research has shown thar when lucid dream therapy is combined with Image rehearsal therapy where the nightmare narrative is altered when awake has shown some encouraging results2.
The Book of Dreams 