Does objective reality exist?

 

Now I want to make everything perfectly clear I AM NOT A PHYSICIST! I also was not a math major. The hard sciences fascinated me but ultimately it was what are called the soft-sciences (psychology, mythology) that attracted me. I say this to make it clear that I have no credibility when it comes to anything that smacks of physics and yet I’m arrogant enough to want to use it as a means of taking a closer look at what’s behind the theoretical curtain of reality that interacts with psychology.

We’ve all been taught about how BIG the universe is and have been introduced to theories about how it came to be e.g. the Big Bang. Seems simple enough though I’ve always imagined the physics behind it all to be much more complex.

Here’s a basic equation describing the Big Bang or expanding universe cosmology        H²=(a/a)²=8 πG/3• ρ–kc²/a²+ Λc²/3* It seems almost too simple to describe something so big as our universe.

And you’d be right if you were to think that because a physicists’ reality never seems to be that simple.

Steven Hawking at Univ. of Cambridge (holding the same chair as Isaac Newton) suggested that the universe has no boundaries—no beginning and no end. To do this, he uses Imaginary Time that runs perpendicular to the past/present/future, “regular” time you and I experience (I know, don’t ask). However, when using “regular time” there will always be a beginning, or T=0.

Abhay Ashtekar, a Penn State physicist uses a model of gravity that allows him to mathematically waltz right up to T=0 and then pass on through to the other side where he says is another universe that is in the process of collapsing rather than expanding like ours. Does this mean that there is a T= minus 0— A previous cause of a first cause, or a first cause before a first cause, or an effect before a first cause? It boggles!

Now here’s a boggle: The London physicist David Bohm believes that objective reality does not exist, that at the heart of it all is a phantasm—a hologram if you will. He argues that at the deepest level of reality everything is actually an extension of the same basic something.

To make this statement he cites the work of the Parisian physicist Alain Aspect who performed an experiment with amazing, some might say magical, results. He and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance between them e.g. one foot or one billion feet between them it makes no difference. But, but… what about Einstein’s nothing can go faster than the speed of light rule?

Bohm says that they are able to do this because their separateness is illusory! They are extensions of the same thing. He uses the following illustration to get a handle on the boggle: Imagine that there is an aquarium with one fish in it swimming around. Now imagine that the only way you can observe the aquarium is via a camera recording the fishes every move. Imagine now that there are two cameras projecting pictures onto two monitors but the second camera is shooting at right angles to the first. If you were to believe you were watching two aquariums and two fish you would see two different movements. But if you were to watch more closely you would see that these movements seem to be linked e.g. when one faces the front the other is facing the side. Because you don’t see them as the same fish its hard to understand the link.

The bottom line is that we are only seeing a portion of the reality and that is what is happening to subatomic particles that are “instantaneously” communicating. At the deepest level of reality the universe is a projection and everything is interconnected.

This sounds like as many theologists’ claim, that everything including you and I are at a fundamental level connected. And the concept that everything is a “projection” appears to mirror what Depth Psychologists have been saying for years i.e. that our reality is but a projection of our own minds.

Science and theology get closer and closer.

________________________

*The Alexander Friedman equation for the expansion of the universe.

 

 

 

The signs of your deeper self are everywhere you look

Some psychotherapists, most notably Carl Jung, imagined the psychotherapeutic process to be like a mandala. It may be true that the natural process of the psyche attempting to become whole again is also very much like a mandala i.e. that one works their way from where they are on the edge of their psyche toward the center where the Self, the source of their being lay. It’s a healing process really. Spiritually we are said to be complete and whole until we are born and become separated from the whole both psychologically and physically. It’s the Adam and Eve story symbolically imbedded in the birth of every child. But the symbolism doesn’t stop there.

Most religions have some sort of mandala that symbolizes the Way, the path toward the source of our being, the way back to the Eden prior to our birth if you will. Essentially it is the center that represents the goal whether that goal be the Christ, God, or Source or the healing of a fractured soul. Jung in his book, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), wrote, “The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals…” (pg. 28 in the English version of the 1993 edition). Dreams can be like this as well in that the symbols of a theme can spiral around a central point of the dream.

Navajo Mandala–Found on https://nwcreations.com/mandala-monday-native-american-mandalas-by-epouna/

It seems as though certain image patterns, very specific symbolic patterns show up across all cultures and even between species e.g. the auspicious symbols of the Tibetan mandala, the Rose mandala of many Christian churches, the mandala of the Azteca, the Navajo and the Hindu, the circular pattern in a rose or the DNA double helix when observed from the top down. All show this spiral pattern circling toward some center.

These repetitive themes remind me of a favorite quote from my mother, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” a mouthful that is defined in Wiktionary as “the physical, cultural, moral, or intellectual development of each individual [that] passes through stages similar to the developmental stages of that individual’s species, society, or civilization.” We see our development process, what Carl Jung called the Individuation process or Abraham Maslow called the Hierarchy of Needs show up everywhere we go, in our dreams, the spiral of a nautilus, or the face of a sunflower.

Symbolically all manmade mandala represent the movement toward wholeness. These patterns are archetypal in nature and indicate strikingly similar symbolic meanings.

In many ways the patterns represent life itself and the manner in which it works.

An example of a mandala in a dream

When these archetypal symbols such as the mandala show up in my dreams I try to pay special attention because I know there’s important information to be had that’s pertinent to my psychological and spiritual growth.

For me it’s heartening to know that the universe is out there always showing me the way if I can just learn to read its often enigmatic signs.

Living in the realm of the “Box-world” and afraid to live outside its illusion of safety

 

Not too long ago I was dreaming of walking around in a box, wandering the inside edges looking for an exit, longing for something different, and unable to find my way out. The box is symbolic of the context of my life, the milieu within which I live my life.

Context, the beliefs we have about life and about ourselves including our judgments of self and our worries, embarrassments, and self-criticisms all affect how we see others. Look at another person and we pretty much only see ourselves. As a matter of fact if you want to know about yourself, note what it is you see in the people you meet.

Challenging our context expands it and it becomes more inclusive and broadens the amount of material and experience we have to draw on to interact efficiently with the only thing that we truly own, the here and now. The human psyche is always trying to expand its context whether the conscious self wants to or not though many folks pride themselves in being able to resist that expansion– they call it loyalty, or unyielding faith, or being true to ones values and beliefs. Basically its just laziness in that it’s easier to not critique ones beliefs or allow for pesky change.

It’s as though this little-self built a box around itself in a misguided (or cynical?) attempt to keep it (you) safe.

Most of us treat our lives in a very narrow manner and get all upset when it’s suggested that we let go of our comforts and seek change i.e. when we are asked to broaden our context.

“Dear me, no. We, Hobbits, are plain quiet folk. Adventures make one late for dinner.”

–Bilbo Baggins (JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit)

I’m sorry fellow humans but we were built for wholeness and change is what leads to wholeness. Rigid, or doctrinal thinking creates an illusion of safety, it is of the small-minded ego and is, I suspect, contrary to the wishes of God or the goal of the universe. Ultimately life is not safe, you don’t have to be reckless with it, but life can be pretty durable and can allow for one to explore all kinds of options. Why would a powerful being such as God want anything less from its creation? Why would it create something so much smaller than itself? God is not of the small-minded and simpering ego, nor is this ego a reflection of God i.e. it’s not the ego self that is made in the image of God. There’s a much bigger you that gives you life, that animates your being and manifests the wishes of that which created it. Do it justice, give it honor by functioning bigger than the “little self”.

Don’t let the “little self” be the leader of your life, point to where you were meant to go and it will follow.

Where were you meant to go? An answer to that question may lie in listening to something other than your ego-self because this little ego-self will always choose the lower easy or self-enhancing road, always. And when I say listen to ‘something other than’, I’m not talking about reading some book or following some guru, priest or priestess, because nothing outside yourself has the same authority and wisdom as your bigger self– your soul. The books and priests are of the box and can only preach to you of what’s in that box.

When in the box of the little-self there are all kinds of things designed to divert ones attention away from the real power in one’s life. There are holy books and all kinds of preachers and gurus who have painstakingly written about or have been trained in the tradition of boxes to make sure that you don’t get outside the box.

What box, you say? One of the best ways of discovering the parameters of the box is to listen carefully to the “box-people”, the box keepers so to speak. They will gladly show you what the box looks like. Once you see it, then you can work out a way to get outside of it and begin the real journey toward authenticity.

For too long we humans have mistrusted our own divinity in favor for the con of the outside world. That’s because we’ve been hoodwinked into believing that the small-minded ego-self had the answers or at least knew where to find them. The ego-self is noisy, boisterous, incessantly verbose, and self-absorbed and effectively hides the quieter voice of the divine within us. This is because the small self doesn’t think that it will survive if the bigger self were to become dominant. But it’s quite the opposite because the bigger self knows that it cannot attain its wholeness without the little-self remaining intact.

 “Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.”

 –Luke 9:23-24

 Give your bigger-self a chance to make good on the promise of that which created you– listen to it, it actually makes more sense.

 

 

Biblical Metaphors for wisdom and Healing

 

There’s magic to be had from the wisdom center of our unconscious minds and I receive quite a number of dream requests that involve religious themes and images. I thought that from time to time I would present a few of these as an adjunct to my spiritual and psychological musings.

The following dream was sent not too long ago. I have redacted any reference to the dreamer and made a couple of minor changes to aid in flow, otherwise the dream and response are word-for-word.

 The Dream:

I am a Lay Preacher in a church in the United Kingdom. Before the dream I had been reading one of my study units Christ is Alive. I used to only remember the waking moment of a dream, but now I sleep less heavily in a sort of 50/50 world. Often in the dreams I hear a narration or overhear what is said. I had a waking dream this morning and many of the symbol words are not listed on your site. So would be pleased for your view as I am not an interpreter of dreams.

Joseph and Mary where in a garden [&] I was listening to them as they spoke and saw them; it was when she was young. Below is what I heard.

Joseph was saying I will build you a shelter in the garden, I know you and your cousin Elizabeth enjoy sitting in the garden knitting. But the weather is getting colder, you need to keep warm I will build you a shelter, so you can enjoy the sun but out of the cold wind. I will build you an arboretum out of wood, darkened on the inside, and will surround it outside by close-planted cedar and larch trees. I will make an entrance by removing one of the stone pillars and I will make it ‘L’ shaped with a space for your donkey. I will make a seat for you to sit on from a piece of finely polished oak that I have in my workshop. I then saw a view of the finished arboretum before I awoke. That was my dream of Joseph & Mary

A Possible Interpretation:

Let’s focus on some of the images e.g. Joseph and Mary as the parents, or caretakers of Jesus: This may represent your own “care-taking” responsibilities. The garden: This can represent a need to cultivate new skills, or your spirituality. Love is also a factor in this dream. If it were a representation of the garden of Eden it could represent the need to recapture your innocence, or your faith (building this garden might also suggest a building of faith). Building of gardens or being within gardens might also suggest some career development needed. The shelter: This may be a security symbol, but could also represent you, your inner self (much as a house or building would). It could also reflect your fear of things, ideas, and/or people who are different from you.

Trees in general, may refer to your hopes, desires, and personal development. Larch trees are often shamanic symbols of strength and protection as is Cedar (though Cedar is also a symbol for healing).

The warm sun and the cold wind symbols are essentially opposite in nature and may reflect that enlightenment has its colder side even though you are trying to avoid it e.g. shelter from it. This could be read as a need to be conscious of some vulnerability, or that you may need to be open to whatever comes your way. The “sun” can also represent “son”, in this case Jesus, while wind can be the breath of God, but it can also represent some turmoil/stress (inner or outer), especially if the wind is strong.

Pillars can represent strength and stability, something that holds you up (such as faith). It can be how you’re standing up to the stress, or how you’re being ‘supported’ by others. Using it to create a doorway can be about personal transformation into something more personally fulfilling.

I’ll add some of these images to the dictionary, thanks. (This has been done in the Dreaming Wizard Dictionary) http://thedreamingwizard.com/dream-dictionary_263.html

Because many dreamers have asked for a broader list of dream symbols with their possible meanings I have also collected over 5000 dream images from over 3000 dreamers and included them in a new book “Morpheus Speaks: The Book of Dreams” coming out in paperback this November (more on this later).

The Waking Dream:

 The dreamer wrote back that they were indeed having a crisis of faith after two failed sermons, an argument with a church member, and an admonition from the lead pastor. He had to temper his own ego in order to make a course correction. This he did and has had two successful Sundays at the podium since.

The dreamer’s inner place of wisdom came to him in a time of need and offered solutions for growth and healing. Trusting this place within you can add great power to your everyday life. Dreams come to us in part for our health and well-being. They are also a place where the mind works through the experiences of the day. Being aware of this process can give you a leg-up in dealing with what life throws at you.

Epic tales, epic symbolism

 

The Battle between Good and evil –by Robert Adelman found on Deviant Art

 

 

As a boy I was fascinated by the tales of Middle Earth as told by J.R.R. Tolkien. I also knew that if one fought bravely enough that good could eventually triumph over evil.

As I grew older I became aware of the Northern Norse mythology that Tolkien used as the foundational source material for his work. But unlike his stories I learned that the most striking feature of this mythology was that all was hopeless, that the apocalyptic battle at Rognarök was humanity’s doom, and that no matter how bravely the hero fought the monsters and giants would defeat humanity and the gods of Asgard.

But I also learned that for the gods and heroes and heroines of the North loss in battle gave meaning and mettle to the warrior who courageously stood their ground and fought on regardless of the fact that all was hopeless.

What’s this? I was dismayed that these epic battles would ultimately end with evil triumphing over good. How could this be? The purity of courage be damned I thought, it needed to be rewarded and besides winning and defeating was the goal of all good and evil confrontations or so I thought. Oh yes and by winning of course was meant that “good” would always prevail.

It wasn’t until years later that I achieved some insight into these wonderful tales from the North.

From the writings of Carl Jung I was introduced to the concept of the Conflict of Opposites and the effect of either ignoring or battling the shadow i.e. evil aspects of our personal or collective nature. In this context. either ignoring or actively suppressing the shadow one gives it power, diminishes their own power, and leads to their being overwhelmed by it.

I surmised that if Jung were right, then the hopelessness and defeat so often celebrated in the Northern myths becomes an allegorical warning to mankind regarding its relationship with the shadow aspects of its personality. Is it possible that when one resists or denies the shadow either in themselves or the society in which they live that its power over us becomes paramount in that our violent response only adds to the violence of the shadow and increases its power and makes impossible to overcome? Oh I won’t deny that some battles can be won but ultimately the shadow keeps returning ever more powerfully. Will we never defeat it and have a permanent peace?

We are both good and evil. So what does this say about a God in whose image we are created? If then God is also both, to resist this would seem futile and self-defeating.

I remember that in a long ago Judo class the teacher talked about not meeting force with force to overcome ones opponent but by using the opponent’s own energy to defeat them. To me now this simple strategy seems a  useful metaphor for dealing with the shadow forces of our nature. If we allow ourselves to become the shadow by denying it we will be defeated no matter how glorious or courageous our actions but if we learn to accept this darker aspect as part of ourselves and turn its energy toward good it can add to our own best intentions and we can prevail.

 

A Buddha dream

 

Some time ago for a men’s group I agreed to give an overview of Buddhism. Now, what I know about Buddhism you could fit in a shot glass and still have room left for the shot. But I didn’t let that stop me, primarily because I wanted to learn something and have long since discovered that it is through the teaching of something that I learn best. What I learned is that by letting go of all my notions about what is real I could quite possibly gain a sense of true happiness.

Self-trust is a theme here as is forgiveness and being responsible–to act as though you are responsible for all there is. Want a good job? Want a good relationship? Want peace in the world? Who’s responsible for that? “But I can’t be responsible for all that!” You might cry. No you can’t, if you define responsibility as a burden, or as blame, or if your image of yourself is too small to include it. If your view of the world is that there is you and then there is everything else, then you are most definitely outnumbered. But what if you held yourself as bigger than your image?

Now, I’m not talking about your ego-image, that’s always small and can only be inflated through and by itself, including only itself, excluding everything else. What I’m talking about is something much bigger than your personal identity–your personal consciousness. I’m talking about the awakening of something primordial, always becoming, life affirming, and inclusive–inclusive from the point-of-view that everything is already connected and reflecting everything else.

It has been said that the consciousness of a Kingdom can be seen in an individual. Truly powerful kingdoms affirm the individual who, in turn, affirms the collective. When I act as though I am you, my responsibility for your well-being shifts because it is my well being that is at stake.

Part of the process of becoming a fully actualized human being includes the rectification of the opposites that exist within us and that we project onto the outside world. As long as we continue to act as though we have no responsibility for the conflicts that are a result of the faux separations we have created in our psyches, then the peacefulness that grows from being connected will struggle to be realized. I say realized because the peace is there–it’s not as though we have to create it. It is, however, hidden beneath all our fears, unacceptance and rigid adherence to personal point-of-view–all things that separate us from each other.

Prince Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) set out on a journey to eradicate suffering. What I think he discovered is the real cause of suffering, us, the ego us, the illusory separate us. He preached a way of reconnecting with what is real in order to reveal the rightness of this greater spirit. In this place of the here and now we can experience the happiness, the joy, that is Being.

Barriers to love and the Spirit within

 

Life is holy, but some people out of either ignorance of that fact or as a self-serving and malevolent expression choose to not treat it as such.

We can either enhance life or diminish it, extol it or denigrate it. What enhances life is love, given freely without strings or attachments. Everything else is just a barrier to achieving and experiencing wholeness everything else is just survival, though of course one needs to maintain the latter to express the former.

But when the survival mode dominates we can only limit ourselves i.e. we take and hoard, hold onto, close up and restrict. In love we give ourselves away and in so doing save ourselves. Survival mode comes from a personal context of insufficiency (there’s not enough) and vulnerability (life is fragile). Survival with no other purpose than to continue life is a form of death. The soul is not about survival but the full expression of who and what you are_ it is about wholeness.

This is what wholeness looks like: No limits, open, truly free i.e. to be unbound by your beliefs, your prejudices, judgments and self-protections.

When we are free of the barriers we put up in order to feel secure, when we can give of our life freely we are then said to be in “possession” of it i.e. it belongs to us and not to someone else’s ideal or belief or dictate or expectation for us. When dominated by our survival mode, or even to the degree by which we have allowed ourselves to be dominated by this mode of living, everything else possesses our life and we are not free to be what we are.

 

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

–Rumi

 

But to be what we are takes immense courage, “The courage to be” as Paul Tillich called it– it’s not about what you do or don’t do, it’s about who you are and expressing that regardless of the evaluation of others.

Your life is holy, everyone’s life is holy and the clannishness we’ve created in order to protect ourselves from seen and unseen dangers is killing us, it selfishly treats only a select few as being holy and only if those few adhere to the clan belief system. There will never be true freedom to “be” with this kind of limit on the expression of wholeness i.e. ‘holiness’.

 

“I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.”

–Rumi

 

Beliefs that teach that only certain humans behaving in certain prescribed ways are looked upon favorably by God attempt to build fences around the real God. But God cannot be fenced in and fences don’t enhance, they diminish. To denigrate the differences between us does not enhance the human spirit it is a barrier to it.

If you were to strip away the stories, the interpretive overlay, and dogma of every religion you will notice that virtually every spiritual leader, credited with starting a new way of thinking, a new way of being in relationship with each other and with the spirit that created us has done so out of knowing that the purpose of being human is to become whole and to express that wholeness freely and honestly. All have known that what we are is love and that we need to learn to express it more freely. Anything else is not love and it is not an expression of wholeness or the sacredness of each of us.

 

“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”

–Rumi

 

Namaste…

WATER: THE FOURTH IN THE FOUR ELEMENTS DREAM SYMBOLS

 

Water in dreams is an incredibly important symbolic
   look into the
        very depths of our being. Found on Deviant Art

“Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!

That ever this should be.

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs,

Upon the slimy sea.”

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

 

Most of the Earth’s water (96.5%) can be found in its oceans and seas. Our lakes, icecaps, glaciers, groundwater and rivers only make up 3.44% of the total. Seventy percent of the Earth’ surface is covered by water. That’s roughly 326 million trillion gallons of the stuff in all its forms i.e. liquid, solid and gaseous with only 2 percent of that being drinkable. Our bodies are mostly water as well (65%).

Water in dreams comes to visit us through floods, rising tides, relentless rain, storms and stormy seas, tidal waves and tsunamis, rivers, lakes, oceans, puddles and pools.

We sink into it, are drowned or are drowning or crawl upon barren lands where not a drop can be found. It comes to us as a becalmed sea, a busy port, or as a trickle formed into a raging river.

Being at the beach can be about standing between two ways of being, or two worlds. It is also a metaphor for intuition and the opening to ones emotions. Longing to get to the other side of a great body of water can be about our barriers, limits, ambitions and goals while tides can be about the ups and downs, ins and outs of our life.

Water gives us both life and death as in the biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea so as to save the Hebrew slaves while drowning the Pharos army. It both refreshes and renews but can just as easily overwhelm and drown.

As with the Ancient Mariner one can find themselves far out to sea with water all around but none to drink and feeling parched and unnourished.

It comes to us as a message of emotional overwhelm or a release of tension and sadness. It cleanses us of our past and that which has made us dirty. It washes away guilt or drowns us in it. We can find ourselves in hot water where difficult situations reign and in too deep and over our head.

We wade through it, muddy it, watch it course by under the bridge and we always seem to be struggling to keep our head above it and though trying to navigate as best we can we try to not be swept away by it.

Water in dreams is our primary metaphor for our moods, emotions and the flow of our feeling energies. How we deal with the water gives insight to how we are dealing with our emotional selves. We can find ourselves hanging on to the edge of a rushing river resisting its onward rush to some unknown future or letting go and going with the flow. We can also find ourselves moving along the surface as though we were a leaf being taken wherever the river thinks important without any volition or participation on our part.

Dreaming of floods, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes and great storms? You may be overwhelmed with emotional situations, fears and anxieties whereas calm seas and placid pools would symbolize the opposite.

In deep oceans, lakes, or seas it speaks from our deeper selves, the source of our being. We can be seen swimming down into its depths and bringing up things from below as a metaphor for active developing consciousness of something kept hidden in the depths, something unconscious and coming into the light.

How we swim can reflect how we are meeting our needs. Water often is a symbol for the state of our being– emotional, psychological, spiritual, sexual, relational.

Often there are monsters from the deep that can be found here and speak to the shadowy denizens of our own unconscious mind i.e. our unmet needs or unrecognized aspects, but so too fish swim from below and bring wisdom to a troubled mind.

Water has been used metaphorically as a means of cleansing the soul so that the spirit of God may enter or as a symbol of death and resurrection aka a rebirth into something new, of washing away one state of being to make room for another.

Well that’s it! Or is it? No, there is a hidden fifth element that binds them all together. It’s the most mysterious of them all and not really an element at all. I’ll share this final aspect of our dream selves in the next Blog.

The Circle in Dreams

Witches Circle

 

 

He drew a circle that shut me out, heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win, we drew a circle that took him in.”“Outwitted” by.– Edwin Markham

 

 

 

 

The Circle it’s arguably the most powerful of all the geometric symbols in both the waking and dreaming worlds. There’s “a circle that drew him in”, an inner circle, crop circles, expand the circle, circle of life, concentric circles, magical circles, circular thinking, a containment, circular file, geomancy, Ouroboros, circle the wagons, coming full circle, secret circles, pie charts, Arctic Circle, going in circles, square the circle, circle of friends,, circling the drain and on and on and on…

Circles in dreams, mandalas, magical incantations, and intuitive awareness’s are used to exclude and include, highlight or delete, expand or restrict awareness. Without the circle virtually nothing would move or exist for that matter e.g. there are gears, wheels, cells, atoms, planets, planetary orbits and galaxies that all come in circle-like forms.

Interpreting dreams can be like peeling an onion that symbolizes the concentric layers of the dream’s symbolism that can lead one to the inner self or God Him/Herself.

This process of digging down into the self is often represented by a circle that is in itself a representation of the self called a mandala. There are also bisected circles to represent the need for balance (yin/yang) or a circle with a cross to represent the Earth our birth mother or with a central dot to represent the life giving mate of the Earth, the Sun.

Astronomical symbol for the Sun

Buddhists draw the circle to represent completeness and wholeness while Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews use it to symbolize the divine.

Carl Jung the famous Analytical Psychologist and dream guru suggested that anything circular in a dream from a bicycle wheel to a ball symbolized a mandala that in itself represented a divine map to the soul.

 

 

“Draw the circle,

draw the circle wide.

Draw the circle, draw the circle wide.

No one stands alone,

we’ll stand side by side.

Draw the circle,

draw the circle wide.”

“Draw the circle wide” By – Gordon Light

 

 

Love

 

What? You thought that because Valentines is over that I wasn’t going to talk about love anymore?

We spend our lives in small things, separated from our bigger essence.

Love is like the ocean. The ocean is but one wave until it is touched by the wind and transformed into many. Between two people it is like two waves traversing the world and finally meeting, the two becoming the one.

Have you noticed that when experiencing love, when you are submerged within it, you see it everywhere you look? Is it actually out there, or is it in the person that experiences it? And why does it seem to come and go so easily?

It seems to me that if you imagine love to be something outside yourself that something or someone puts into you, then you are separated from your true nature. You and I spend a lot of our lives in a shallow sleep of small things where we have imagined ourselves separated from our bigger essence. It’s because we think that who we are stops at the end of our skin. And we spend a lot of time and energy protecting that skin from the so-called outside world. But in this world where as a lone creature we seek safety, we fail to see that safety, true safety, can only exist when we are not separate.

In order to feel love we need to feel safe and in order to feel safe we need to surrender this notion that we are separate. Love cannot truly visit our being with barriers and boundaries surrounding us. Including others by including them in the attentiveness of our hearts awakens us to not only their humanity but our own as well.

A consciousness of the real self meditation:

In a quiet room imagine yourself expanding your consciousness so that it takes in everything in the room. Now expand that awareness to include the house, and the neighborhood with all its people, animals, trees and insects. Expanding this consciousness even further, imagine that you have become within the limits of your skin the whole city, state and nation. Expanding out into space look down at the world that is now a part of you and push ever outward to include the Moon, the planets, the Sun.

Now, ever so quickly, expand to include the galaxy and then to all the stars and galaxies that make up the universe until you are at the very edge of time and space and the emptiness that it is expanding into. Then include the emptiness– the nothing.

Look closely now into the darkness of your mind. Is there and end to it, can you actually see the walls where your mind ends? No, you cannot, for what you are doesn’t have an end. If you are an expression of everything then there is no real threat against you. It is only when you are a tiny, quivering little thing, alone and drifting in the hugeness of existence that you have to protect yourself.

 

A Rumi Meditation

The Dervish

 

The Sufi Dervish. Their focus is on the universal values of love and service to the world. In their practice they try to let go of the illusions of ego in order to open to God.

 

Try using this poem by the 13^th century Sufi poet, Rumi as a meditation for expanding your awareness.

 

“You have heard of the ocean of nonexistence.

Try continually to give yourself to that ocean. 

Every workshop has its foundations

Set on that emptiness.

The master of all masters works with nothing.

The more such nothing comes into your work,

The more the presence will be there.

 Dervishes gamble everything.

They lose and win the other,

The emptiness which animates this.

 We have talked so much.

Remember what we have not said.

 And keep working. Laziness and disdain
are not devotions. Your effort will bring a result.

 As dawn lightens, blow out the candle.

Dawn is in your eyes now.”

 

 

Imagine your life up to now as but a dream limited only by your imagination. Imagine waking up within the dream to discover how really big you actually are. When awake in your life, love becomes the foundation of that life. When lucid in your dream you expand rapidly into your bigger self. Love is what you actually are.