I have been working on this book on the Soul for twenty years and am putting some chapters onto the website. More will follow shortly. Obviously this material, including the title, is copyright but until I find a publisher I am happy for people to draw on it, provided they acknowledge its source. I have changed the original title of The Dream of the Water to the Dream of the Cosmos as I gradually came to understand the meaning of the "Divine Water". I would like to express my deep gratitude to Joy Parker without whose editorial skills and encouragement this book could not have been completed.

The Dream of the Cosmos
Part Two

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cosmos and Soul

The Wave - Robin Baring

You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; so profound is its meaning.

                                                                                                   — Heraclitus

The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.
                                                   
                                                                                                    — Novalis

While I was gathering sayings for The Mystic Vision. I came across a book called The Story of My Heart by a man called Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), who lived in the Dorset countryside in the late nineteenth century. To me there has never been a more beautiful or more precious hymn to the soul which, at the same time, is a hymn to the beauty and marvel of the earth. I was amazed and moved to read these words in his diary: “There is an Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised…It is in addition to the existence of the soul; in addition to immortality; and beyond the idea of the deity...There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched. There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined.”(1)
           In another passage, he expressed his longing for relationship with this Soul-Entity:

I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness— I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me…Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower, breathing the earth-encircling air, thinking of the sea and the sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to touch it, prone on the sward in token of deep reverence, thus I prayed that I might touch to the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity.(2)

           These beautiful words reveal two concepts of soul: the personal one, traditionally carrying a feminine quality and resonance, which carries the deepest feelings and longings of the heart, the core of our being, and connects us to a deeper ground. But also a wider cosmic one that Jefferies calls a soul-entity and compares to an immense ocean. I think most people will recognize the first but what of the second – the cosmic dimension of soul? Richard Jefferies was yearning for something that people once felt they belonged to, in whose life they lived. Over the centuries and millennia of the solar era, this feeling of belonging to an invisible entity beyond the community of tribe or nation, something experienced as numinous, immeasurable and all-embracing, was gradually lost and with it the sense of participation in a sacred, living universe — a vast inter-connecting web of life where every single creature and element of life was connected to every other. It was this that D.H. Lawrence was lamenting when he wrote “We have lost the cosmos.”(3)
           Not long after Richard Jefferies, Richard Bucke wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness in which he described the lives of individuals who have had an awakening experience, an epiphany which revealed to them dimensions of consciousness still unimagined by most of us. He believed that the whole human race might one day experience this state.(4)
           Like Richard Bucke, I believe that this expanded state of knowing and experiencing, this capacity for a deeper relationship with life can be developed in all of us. And this different quality of knowing could enable us to experience a dimension of reality in which we are unknowingly embedded, a dimension that, millennia ago, was known and named as the soul of the cosmos. Our own consciousness, which includes the whole spectrum of experience between instinct and the rational intellect as well as the furthest reaches of the imagination, could participate once again in this greater planetary and cosmic soul of which our culture has lost all awareness. This breakthrough to a state of conscious participation could help us to formulate a new worldview or paradigm of reality – a new meta-narrative - that might draw together all the fragmented peoples and fragmented aspects of our world in a shared vision, helping us to address the very serious problems we now face.
           Here is a different vision of our potential future described by one of that group of people whom I call astronauts of the soul. For many years, Christopher Bache has been Professor of Religious Studies at an American University and, briefly, Director of Studies at the Noetic Institute in California. Over these years, he recorded his experience of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Here is a striking passage from his book, Dark Night, Early Dawn:

Just when Western culture had convinced itself that the entire universe was a machine, that it moves with a machine’s precision and a machine’s blindness, the ability to experience the inner life of the universe is being given back to us…The entire human endeavor has been emptied of existential purpose and significance because it has been judged to be a product of blind chance. When one gains access to the inner experience of the universe, however, one learns that, far from being an accident, our conscious presence here is the result of a supreme and heroic effort. Far from living our lives unnoticed in a distant corner of an insentient universe, we are everywhere surrounded by orders of intelligence beyond reckoning. (5)

           What his experiences suggest is that the entire universe, visible and invisible is, in his words, “a unified organism of extraordinary design reflecting a massive Creative Intelligence.” As he describes his own experience,

The unified field underlying physical existence completely dissolved all boundaries. As I moved deeper into it, all borders fell away, all appearances of division were ultimately illusory. No boundaries between incarnations, between human beings, between species, even between matter and spirit. The world of individuated existence was not collapsing into an amorphous mass, as it might sound, but rather was revealing itself to be an exquisitely diversified manifestation of a single entity.(6)

           From this experience it seems that the creative process, the visible universe and the invisible cosmic ground or “soul” of the cosmos are inseparable. The implications of this statement for long-established beliefs in a God outside or transcendent to creation, distinct and separate from planetary life and ourselves, are enormous and for some, may be disturbing. Instead of being created by God, it seems that we might be living within God, even that we are atoms participating in the “dance” of an immeasurable cosmic entity.
           Long ago, in the Palaeolithic era, the rituals in the cave and the handprint on its walls put men and women in “touch” with an unseen source of life of which the darkness of the cave was the symbol. Now, 20,000 years later, at a new turn of the spiral of evolution, it may be that many of us are “touching” with our imagination the soul, spirit or ground of the cosmos, the invisible fabric into which our lives are woven.
           The consciousness of the universe waits for us to be able to respond to its longing to communicate with us, to recognize the fact that it animates and supports the whole of our existence. Our human consciousness is integral to that greater consciousness, even though it is still partially developed or immature. The soul in its universal sense is a word that describes a vast and complex web of relationships which connects the phenomenal world with this unseen ground.
           Imagine that we could see through the physical forms, including our own bodies which we experience as opaque and solid and were able to see myriad patterns of energy interacting with each other and connecting us with the life around us. Imagine light irradiating every cell of our bodies and everything we perceive. Imagine billions of atoms dancing in this light and interacting with each other. We would experience the dance and the rhythm and creative flow of life as something we are part of. We experience ourselves as distinct entities, but if the whole universe is one integrated, living organism, one flowing, undivided energy, one symphony of cosmic sound, then we are part of this whole. We could perhaps imagine the soul as a living cosmic entity —a web of shining filaments of light flowing through the starry galaxies of space as well as through our bodies and the forms of the animals, plants, trees and the landscape we see around us. How did we ever come to believe that the universe and matter are inanimate and dead?
           I believe that we are re-awakening to awareness that we and the phenomenal world that we call nature are woven into a cosmic tapestry whose threads connect us not only with each other at the deepest level but with the creative ground of life. Beyond our present time-bound sight a limitless or infinite field of consciousness interacts with our own, asking to be recognized by us, embraced by us. The realization that we participate in a level of reality that is the source and ground of our own being may eventually shatter the belief that this material reality is all there is; that we exist on a tiny planet in a lifeless universe and that there is no life beyond death. It may be that this invisible cosmic field of consciousness has waited aeons for us to reach the point where more than a handful of individuals could awaken to this awareness.
           Just as it dawned on the early Portuguese explorers that the world was not flat but round so, incredulously, the realization is dawning that the universe may not consist of dead, insentient matter but is conscious in every part of itself. It seems that we may be immersed in a sea or field or web of energy so fine that no instrument can as yet detect it, although it may tentatively be connected with the mysterious invisible “dark matter” that constitutes 96% of the known universe. This web of living energy embraces our universe, perhaps many universes. It is paradoxically at once “greater than the great” and “smaller than the small,” co-inherent with the immensity of the known universe and the most minute particles of matter. It is the ground or invisible field that connects us to each other and to every aspect of life.
           For thousands of years, from the beginning of recorded history and long before that, the most gifted poets, shamans, visionaries, artists, musicians and mystics of all cultures have connected us to this deep ground of life. Some of their names have come down to us and have been rightly celebrated. Others are unknown. They have connected the seen to the unseen, the time-bound world to the eternal, the waking mind to the dreaming soul. They have found the hidden dimension of soul reflected in the imagery of unexplored territory, the inviolate nature of the deep forest or the high mountains; the depth and vast expanse of the sea, the mystery of the cosmos and its countless billions of stars. From century to century, as links in a great golden chain, they have kept alive the true values of the soul—the values that honor and celebrate the wonder, beauty and awesome mystery of life.
           In its simplest terms, the greater dimension or matrix of the soul is the secret, hidden dimension that is the goal of the hero’s quest in myth and legend. It is the ultimate destination of all exploration — the unknown, mysterious, fabulous land. In the language of mythology and fairy-tale, it is the kingdom of faerie, the realm of the gods. In the language of visionary revelation, it is the kingdom of heaven that is spread out before our unseeing eyes, the sacred ground of the visible world and our own being. It is the source of everything we are, everything we perceive. It is both creator and creation. If the soul is all this, it is not surprising that it transcends our present level of consciousness, that we cannot comprehend it after a few hours or years of search and study. Yet, paradoxically, we are both that which seeks to comprehend and the object of our comprehension. We are both part and whole.
           In this sense what we call our consciousness is infinite, yet as small as the tiny part of itself, the lens through which we try to fathom that immeasurable greatness. How recent a development is our present consciousness in comparison with the age of the universe, even with the age of our planet. How difficult then for us to encompass the meaning of the soul. If I were to ask the question, “Who am I?” the answer would be “I am the life of the cosmos discovering itself through its own creation.”
           As explained in earlier chapters, in lunar culture soul in this wider cosmic sense was imagined as a Great Mother — a web of unimaginable extent and complexity connecting each one of us at the deepest level to all others and to the ground of life. In later solar culture, presided over by the Great Father, spirit takes precedence over soul, which comes to be imagined in a personal sense, although still retaining the feminine imagery of the earlier era. Woman herself was often portrayed by poets and playwrights — as in Dante’s great work — as the carrier of man’s soul. Whether we use the word “spirit” or “soul” it seems that each, in its widest sense, describes the deep ground or source of being that is the foundation of our own consciousness. Spirit has a more active, dynamic quality; soul a more containing, relational, embracing one. We live on the surface of life and know nothing of its depths.
           The idea that our world rests on the ground of an invisible “Other” survived in the mystical traditions of the solar age which transmitted the lunar idea of the divinity of nature and the co-inherence of matter and spirit. It also survived in some of the close-knit indigenous communities of the world where the traditions which respected the sacredness of the earth and the cosmos were kept alive and transmitted from generation to generation — even to the present day. It was this palpable sense of the aliveness of soul that so impressed me when I traveled through India and further East in the 1950’s. The presence of an intangible ground seemed to pervade the numinous beauty of the landscape but it also emanated from the people themselves whose close bond with the land they worked endowed them with timeless dignity, grace and serenity notwithstanding the desperate poverty in which they lived.
           Chapters Five and Six explored the difference between lunar and solar culture and showed how the perception of the cosmos as a living being was lost during the solar era, and how our conscious self-reflective rational mind gradually became separated from the deeper instinctive ground out of which it had emerged as well as from the life of nature on which our lives depend.
           Chapter Seven showed how, through the great meta-narrative of the Fall of Man, nature and this world became desacralized. The powerful influence of St. Augustine and the doctrine of Original Sin severed humanity from its deeper ground by imposing on the Christian community the belief that the world was fundamentally flawed and man contaminated by sin and separated from God — from which state only those who were predestined would be rescued by the grace of God. Although there were many others factors over a time-span of several thousand years contributing to the loss of soul, this doctrine drastically undermined the older lunar participatory experience of life and led, ultimately, to the current loneliness and alienation of man in an indifferent and inanimate cosmos.
           With the Renaissance and the translation of Plato’s works and Hermetic texts by the Florentine Marsilio Ficino, the idea of a World-Soul and the divinity of man was revived in Europe. Within a small circle of individuals, nature was again perceived as ensouled. Yet these ideas could not take root and flourish. The young Pico della Mirandola gave his great Oration on the Dignity of Man but was murdered before he could accomplish his dream of bringing together the teaching of Kabbalah with that of Christianity. Giordano Bruno, one of the most innovative and creative philosophers of his time, was sent to the stake in Rome in 1600 for declaring that nature was ensouled and that the World-Soul illuminated the universe.
           As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, soul comes to life in the work of the great poets of the Romantic Movement who reconnected their culture to nature and to the imagination: Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Tennyson, Goethe. Blake could write: “Everything that lives is Holy.” A century earlier soul shines through the words of the visionary poet, Thomas Traherne (1637-1674) in his Centuries of Meditations: “The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.” And in two other visionary passages which I quote here because I love them so much:

You will never enjoy the World aright, till the sea itself floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the Stars and perceive yourself to be the Sole Heir of the whole World: and more…because Men are in it who are every one Sole Heirs, as well as you…Till your Spirit fills the whole World, and the Stars are your jewels.

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world, the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.

           Go further back and soul comes to life in the Dante’s great visionary poem and in the medieval quest for the Holy Grail — image of the boundless realm of the eternal pouring forth its light and love for the nourishment of humanity. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus speaks of this realm when he says that the kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth but we do not see it. Go still further back and we hear Parmenides describing his journey into the immortal realm of the goddess, driving in a chariot through immense gates that stretched from earth to heaven.(7)
           So many fragments from different cultures describing the ancient cosmic idea of soul have mysteriously survived. However, without my vision of the goddess, I would never have come to know that the soul is not in us: we are in the soul. Thanks to this vision, my work has been devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world, to the recovery of our connection to a living cosmos, and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the “body” of the earth, and between us and the invisible ground—whether described as soul or spirit—that is the source of both.

The Garden as a Metaphor of the Soul
           Music and poetry feed the soul, and beauty like the wondrous beauty of Chartres Cathedral. But there is also the beauty of nature—of flowers and the different varieties of trees. From earliest recorded times in every civilization, people have been drawn to design and create gardens as a place of calm and order, a sanctuary for contemplation, prayer and communion, and for repose, enjoyment and delight. It is difficult to say when the garden first became a metaphor for the soul but it is certainly found in the Taoist, Zen Buddhist, Christian and Islamic traditions. In medieval times, Mary was imagined and addressed as the garden of the soul and many paintings show her sitting in a garden or beneath a rose arbor holding her infant son on her lap.
           In the Islamic section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Persian Ardabil Carpet—a priceless legacy from the past—shows a garden representing paradise with a verse from a poem by the poet Hafiz woven into it: “Except for thy haven, there is no refuge for me in this world. Other than here, there is no place for my head.”
           People sometimes say of a special landscape or a beautiful building, “this place has soul.” They mean that it has a certain quality of being, a resonance which, intuitively, they recognize as precious to them. They might say of that place: “It touches my heart.” And if they are asked where they feel things most deeply, they will often point to their heart.
           They are right to do so for the heart is the key to connection with the soul. The heart has its own kind of consciousness, its own deeply instinctive way of knowing just as the mind has its own way of knowing. The heart functions like an umbilical cord which connects us to the life of the soul, the greater life of the ground of our being. The heart generates all our quests, all our hopes and longings and will ultimately reunite us with the source from which we have come. Without the heart — without the instinct to feel, to imagine, to hope and to love — life is meaningless, sterile. When we are in touch with our heart, open to our deepest feelings and longings, able to live and express them, it comes alive, it vibrates, it sings.
           The image of the garden reminds me of a book called The Secret Garden which I loved as a child. (8) As you read this chapter, imagine, as a child would, that there is a secret garden in each of us. It is hidden behind a high wall, The wall itself is overgrown with brambles, thorns and ivy, a little like the hedge of thorns in the story of the Sleeping Beauty. Imagine yourselves as the girl in the story of the Secret Garden, running towards the hidden wall, following a robin who has befriended her that seems to be showing her the way. It scratches in the earth, looking for a worm. Suddenly she catches sight of a rusty key half-buried in the soil. Picking it up, she asks the robin to show her the door of the garden that she is now sure exists behind the wall. He sings a song from the top of the wall and, as he does so, a gust of wind blows aside the thick trails of ivy that cover it. She catches sight of a door-knob. She has found the door. She fits the key into the lock and, with great effort – for it is very rusty - turns it. The door opens slowly. She slips through it, shutting it behind her and stands with her back against it, looking about her and breathing fast with excitement and wonder and delight. She is inside the secret garden.
           So might we, each one of us, find his or her way into the neglected garden of the soul if we can allow stories like this one to come to life in us; if we can listen once again as we did when we were children, to the myths, legends and fairy-tales which can lead us into this hidden realm we know so little about.

The Sea as an Image of Cosmic Soul
           From my dreams and from Jung's invaluable discoveries I know that the sea is one of the primary images of the soul. In the epic sea journeys of our time that have captured the imagination and admiration of millions, I could recognize the inspiration of the heroic quest but it seemed to me that this is one way of living the quest. There is also the journey into the invisible sea of the soul, that mysterious sea so difficult to find, so incomprehensible to the mind conditioned to believe that there is only physical reality.
           The sea has always been associated with the image of the goddess – with Kwan Yin in China and the Virgin Mary in the Christian West; for millennia sailors invoked their protection when they set out in their frail vessels across its dark immensity. But transpose the image of the sea to the measureless sea of the soul. And imagine the small vessel of our individual consciousness sailing on the surface of an infinite sea of energy which is continually surging, dancing, flowing into being.
           This brings to mind the “immense ocean of energy” described by physicist David Bohm in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order where he writes that what we perceive with our senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground of all existence, including ourselves. “The entire universe of matter as we generally observe it is to be treated as a comparatively small pattern of excitation” on this invisible sea of energy which he names the Implicate Order. (9)
           Fritjof Capra in his Tao of Physics, published some years ago, describes his experience of the dance of this eternal ground:

I ‘saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ‘saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I ‘felt’ its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at the moment I knew that this was the dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers, worshipped by the Hindus. (10)

           Imagine this limitless sea as an incredible matrix of invisible relationships or connections that underlies and permeates our visible world. Imagine it as an inconceivably complex, multi-levelled network of dimensions nested within dimensions, with information continually being exchanged between these dimensions at the molecular level, at the level of our own telepathic communication with each other, at the level of planetary life, and at the level of galaxies and perhaps any number of parallel universes or dimensions of reality of which, as yet, we know nothing. In this invisible “fabric” of the universe is encoded the experience of all orders of life over billions of years as we measure time but the potential for limitless creation is also there and we participate in that process of creation.
           In our modern culture, we are usually so completely absorbed in external reality that it may never occur to us that the longing we may experience to set out on journeys to explore foreign lands might reflect the soul’s own longing to be explored, its longing to reveal to us in the evocative words of an Old Testament prophet “the treasures of darkness and the hidden riches of secret places” (Isaiah 45:3). The soul may be calling to us for recognition and relationship but we may unknowingly ignore the foundation on which the whole edifice of life rests. It is this neglect of the foundation of ourselves that causes so many people deep distress, the feeling that they are not fully alive. Neglect of the soul drives them into endless pursuit of material things as a compensation for what, unknowingly, they have lost.

The Stranger in Whose House We Live
           People sometimes dream of being in a house with rooms they had no idea existed, or find themselves going through a door into an unknown part of it. The soul can be thought of as a stranger in whose house we live but whom we have never met. This stranger has been the witness of everything experienced since the beginning of our evolution as well as carrying everything that is still latent as a potential within us. This stranger, this greater consciousness of which our own consciousness is a part - though still unware of its parentage - is the basic energy of life which creates, destroys and perpetually transforms its own essential being. It has brought forth the universe, the galaxies, our planet, the life that has given us physical form, our nervous system, our extraordinary imagination and our power of reflection and passionate urge to explore.
           The idea of meeting this stranger may seem faintly ridiculous at first, even somewhat terrifying. The soul speaks an unfamiliar language, like the language of hieroglyphs, whose symbols have to be painstakingly learned before we can understand their meaning. An understanding of the symbolic language of the soul can help to make communication possible. As the capacity develops to notice what it is trying to communicate, to divine its intention and guidance, it begins to come alive as a living presence.  
          An awareness and understanding of the symbolic imagery of dreams can be of help in this creative work as later chapters will suggest. But there are also the insights and the sense of connection that have become available to us through the painstaking work of others who have opened up for us this unexplored dimension of human experience. Jung developed the method that he called Active Imagination to enter into dialogue with the soul. Meditation can help to separate the underlying ground from the continual stream of thoughts and anxieties which can distract us from communion with it.
           When I enter the great temples and cathedrals reared by our human aspiration towards the infinite, I become aware that I am s entering consecrated ground, whether that ground is the Palaeolithic cave, Neolithic passage grave, temple, cathedral, walled city or sacred grove. I know that all these represent the greater dimension of my being. I enter these places to marvel at the genius of men who were able to bring forth these magnificent expressions of creative spirit but I also now see them as the earthly embodiment of the unseen temple in which I live.

The Greater Self, Spirit, Presence and Guide
           All religious traditions speak of the spirit guide, the hidden presence, the angelic messenger, the revelatory voice. The tradition of the spirit guide is very ancient, going back to Egyptian, Cretan and Greek civilization, as well as Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Persian and all indigenous cultures. The great dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita gives us the image of the profound relationship between the divine ground and the individual self that may be constellated once there is recognition of its constant presence. Arjuna cries out to Krishna, “Thou are the Knower within me and the One to be known. By Thee alone this universe is pervaded. Overjoyed am I to see what I have never seen before.” (11)
           There has always been a strong tradition of messages and guidance from angels in Christian culture. One has only to look at medieval sculptures and the great angels portrayed in the stained glass of the Gothic cathedrals and the paintings of the early Renaissance to see how alive that tradition still was for the people of Europe at that time. It has been lost because we have grown so out of touch with the soul. The role of music was to open the heart to the awareness of spirit. The great cathedrals and basilicas were filled with the beauty and harmony of sound which flowed from the pen of great composers — opening the hearts of those listening to their music to ecstatic communion with the divine. Mantras and chants surviving from ancient cultures offer the same communion.
           The teaching of the spiritual guide is equally strong in Islamic culture, particularly in the mystical stream known as Sufism. Henri Corbin, the great student of Sufism, writes that

Some souls have learned everything from invisible guides, known only to themselves…The ancient sages…taught that for each individual soul, or perhaps a number of souls with the same nature and affinity, there is a being of the spiritual world, who, throughout their existence, adopts a special solicitude and tenderness toward that soul or group of souls; it is he who initiates them into knowledge, protects, guides, defends, comforts them. (12)

           My own life experience has taught me that we can receive continual help and guidance from the ground of our own consciousness that has brought our consciousness into being over aeons of time and contains all of us within its embrace. Although there are periods of intense darkness and depression that the alchemists called the “nigredo”, with patient work and in moments of sudden illumination, we can open ourselves to awareness of that presence, that ground of spirit. What is it in us that urges us to grow beyond ourselves? Who is it who guides us step by step towards the discovery of some truth that we intuitively sense is there, or towards the realization of a potential we feel we have? Who is it who knows the end when we can only see the beginning? What helps us when it seems there is no help to be found? Who leads us to the creative work that is right for us, work that helps us to grow, that leads us to discover things we knew nothing about and that might be of some help and encouragement to others? Is this all our own doing? Or is there a presence greater than our own limited consciousness?
            The poet Yeats wonderfully describes this presence in his autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil: “I know that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, and that teaches the birds to make their nest; and I know that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.”
           All religious traditions have recorded the words of the great teachers of humanity whose teaching comes through them from that source-ground. In Christianity, connection with this ground is mediated by the figure of Jesus; in Buddhism by the Buddha; in Hinduism by Krishna; in Taoism by Lao Tzu; and in mystical Islam by the figure of El Khidr, known as the “Green One.” The divine ground itself has been described as the Tao, as Brahman, as God or Allah, as the Void, as the Holy One and His Shekinah. It has been seen in vision and described variously as Light and as a cosmic androgynous Being of Light, holding all creation within itself.
           It seemed to me that two thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Piscean Age, Jesus attempted to heal the fragmentation of the soul by returning men and women to its deeper instinctual wisdom, through which they might discover the kingdom and the treasure of relationship with it enshrined in the words “I and my Father are one.”
           As a messenger of the divine ground, a true son of God, Jesus was opening our awareness to the possibility of relationship with that ground. Why did he ask us to love one another and to be reconciled with our enemies? Was it because, aware of both his divinity and his humanity, he recognized both the oneness and the sacred nature of the whole manifest order? Why did he say, “Ye are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you”? (John 10:34) Perhaps because he knew that all men and women had the potential of bringing forth the divinity latent within them through a direct and growing relationship with the divine source-ground that He called “The Father”. Why, in the enigmatic saying in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (logion 77) did he say, “Cleave the wood and I am there; lift up a stone and you will find Me there” if not to point to the fact that nature and matter rest on the ground of spirit, that in their essence, they are spirit.
           The revelation that he brought and that his disciples at first found so hard to comprehend was of opening the heart to awareness of the unity and divinity of life, and therefore, to love and compassion for all. Jesus himself lived his life from the values and wisdom intrinsic to that perception of reality. This astonishing revelation, this seeing truly into the hidden reality behind the forms of life, participating fully in it while living in this earthly dimension, is the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the grain of mustard seed which, tiny at the beginning when it is first planted in the soil of the soul, can grow into a mighty tree, hung with the fruit of insight, wisdom and compassion. These beautiful words recorded in the Gnostic Acts of John spoken by Jesus on the eve of his Passion often come back to me and I have often silently spoken them to myself in moments of need:

I am a lamp to you who behold Me;
I am a mirror to you who perceive Me;
I am a door to you who knock at Me;
I am a way to you a wayfarer.
You have me for a bed; rest then upon Me. (13)

           There are many passages in The Mystic Vision which bear witness to the guidance or presence of the greater self but I particularly love these words of Bede Griffiths:

Each man must discover this Centre in himself, this Ground of his being, this Law of his life. It is hidden in the depths of every soul, waiting to be discovered. It is the treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price. It is the one thing which is necessary, which can satisfy all our desires and answer all our needs. But it is hidden now under deep layers of habit and convention. The world builds up a great protective barrier round it. (14)

           Sri Aurobindo, a great Indian teacher of the last century, has described the process of awakening to the presence and guidance of spirit in these words:

As the crust of our outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the nature and stuff of consciousness refines to a greater subtlety and purity and the deeper psychic experiences become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul then manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body...It takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of our nature. (15)

           To bring the latent spirit into consciousness involves becoming aware of the many habits of belief and behavior that stand between the outer personality and the deeper ground. The possibility of communion with it is latent in us as a potential. To bring this hidden potential into manifestation is the work of a lifetime, even of many lifetimes. As the relationship between the surface personality and the ground of spirit grows stronger, we become more aware of its voice, its presence and its subtle guidance. A deepening relationship with this ground can become the inner fabric and focus of our lives. It is something that we can weave into being with our attention, developing insight through our longing for understanding and guided to methods and discoveries which help us to awaken to its presence. I believe the Maharishi said that meditation is like being dipped into a vat filled with golden dye. Eventually, after many dippings, one begins to take a rich, deep hue.
           The growing relationship of the conscious mind with the eternal ground can change the quality of our lives, giving them a deeper resonance, a different focus. Relationship with the spirit brings us into closer relationship with the whole of life. Anxiety and depression, for which we seek treatment through so many drugs, diminish. Dysfunctional ways of behaving — addiction to alcohol, drugs and casual sexual relationships — fall away. A different approach to personal relationships, letting go of the need for control, helps us to resolve many difficult problems in our individual lives and in the wider world. Through this transformation, so gradual and subtle that it is almost imperceptible, our perception of the world is transformed.
           Ultimately, what in the beginning was perceived as separate — inner and outer —myself and other, begins to fuse and become one: one life, one consciousness, one whole. It used to be thought that we could not become “spiritual” without sacrificing the life of the body, renouncing sexuality, embracing an ascetic life. This is now understood to be a false attitude derived from the split between spirit and nature which was so deeply imprinted on the dualistic mind-set of the solar age. The body is to be loved and respected because it is an expression and vehicle of the soul's life in this dimension of reality. Spirituality cannot be forced. It evolves.
           On the diagram of the Tree of Life in the tradition of Kabbalah, the meeting place of the surface and the depths of our being lies at the intersection of the World of Formation and the World of Manifestation (the visible world). To receive the influx of guidance flowing from these deeper dimensions of consciousness, we need to prepare a vessel, to learn to hear and see and understand in a different way. We need to develop different values from the ones that currently govern the world. This is extraordinarily difficult because the spell of those values is so powerful and we are caught in it like flies in honey.
           This transformation of values cannot be done all at once (or only very rarely). Adherence to a specific religious belief does not necessarily accomplish this transformation. For many years, it may feel as if one is doing the splits, with one foot in each set of values. The movement from one to the other must at every stage be grounded in everyday reality, in close relationships, in performing with care, skill and love all the routine jobs of daily life. Above all, time and space need to be set aside for reflection, meditation and contemplation.
           Mystics and teachers from every tradition say that at the core of our being we are, in our essence, one with the divine. We are one with the immensity we contemplate. And it teaches that the eye of the heart can slowly be opened to awareness of this divine reality. But the ground has to be well prepared to hold the tension of this awareness and this preparation requires much time for contemplation as well as grounding in the world and some kind of work that expresses a growing respect and love for life. Each person can find his or her path with the help of others who have gone before, or through connection with awakened people who are teaching methods of reconnection. Deep soul friendships can be formed. One of the greatest rewards is finding friends through the mysterious connecting and attracting power of the web of the soul as well as, very recently, the web of the Internet. But who or what arranges all these meetings, these connections, if not Cosmic Intelligence, or the Holy Spirit, or Sacred Mind, or the Implicate Order — whichever image you prefer — working through centuries and millennia and the souls of countless individuals to awaken our slumbering consciousnessness to awareness of its ground.
           Because we have not been taught how to recognize and interpret the communications coming to us from this greater dimension, the voice of the soul or the call of the spirit may go unheeded. Only the outer aspect of life is experienced. Even that aspect, which may seem so rich and exciting to begin with, may lose its fascination because we do not look deeper. We may have no access to the ground of our being because we do not understand its language or the ways in which it is trying to communicate with us. Yet, there exists in us a faculty in us that might be compared to an unused icon on our computers that can be activated. If the path into the depths of ourselves is discovered and gently followed, greater understanding of life develops so that it is no longer lived unconsciously, responding blindly to events as they happen. As we tread it we begin to comprehend and relate to the greater entity of Cosmic Soul and to the intelligent spirit that informs the whole; we begin to align ourselves with that greater life, like a planet orbiting the sun.

Notes:

1. Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart, Constable & Co.Ltd., London, 1947, p. 46-7
2. ibid, p. 20-21
3. D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1931, p. 78
4. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1923
5. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 4
6. ibid, p. 74
7. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Golden Sufi Press and Element Books,
8. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
9. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1980, p. 91-2
10. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House, UK, 1979, p. 9
11. Bhagavad Gita, 11:38, 45
12. Henri Corbin, Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Abu'l Baraha
13. The Gnostic Acts of John, G.R.S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 431
14. Bede Griffiths, Return to the Centre, Collins, St. James's Place, London, 1976 and
Templegate, Springfield, Ill. 1977
15. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Lotus Light Publications, Wilmot, WI, 1990

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INTERLUDE:
The Way of theTao

Fan K'uan

There is an ancient spiritual tradition very different from the Christian one, yet which is the complement to it, the feminine balance to our masculine solar consciousness, one of the few cultural legacies which point to the deep intelligence of lunar culture. I was fortunate enough to have as a god-father a man who had lived for decades in China and I was able to spend many hours with him on my return from my journeys to the East. In his old age, he even looked like a Chinese sage and he taught me about Taoism, showing me many precious manuscripts and paintings he had brought back from his sojourn in China. I cherished the words he spoke to me as he told me never to forget the wisdom of the Taoist sages.
           In particular, he mentioned the genius of a poet of the T’ang dynasty called Wang Wei. He explained to me that the Taoist sages had discovered how to develop the mind without losing touch with the soul and this is why an understanding of their philosophy — China’s inestimable gift to humanity — was so important. Whereas the West imagined the creative ground of being in the image of a transcendent Father, Taoism, more subtly and comprehensively than any other spiritual tradition, nurtured the quintessence of the Feminine as a Primordial Mother, keeping alive the ancient feeling of relationship with Nature as the manifest expression of this mysterious ground.

There was something formless yet complete
That existed before heaven and earth;
Without sound, without substances,
Dependent on nothing, unchanging,
All pervading, unfailing.
One may think of it as the Mother of all things under heaven
Its true name we do not know.
                     
                                 Tao Teh Ching, trans. Arthur Waley

           The elusive essence of Taoism is expressed in the Tao Teh Ching, the only known work of the great sage Lao Tzu (born ca. 604 BC.), whom legend says was persuaded to write down the eighty-one sayings by one of his disciples when, reaching the end of his life, he had embarked on his last journey to the mountains of the West. The word Tao means the fathomless Source, the One, the Deep. Teh is the way the Tao comes into being, growing organically like a plant from the deep ground or source of life, from within outwards. Ching is the slow, patient shaping of that growth through the activity of a creative intelligence within nature that is expressed as the organic patterning of all instinctual life, a kind of DNA of the universe. “The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.”
           The origins of Taoism come from the shamanic practices and the oral traditions which were developed perhaps as long ago as the Neolithic era. Its earliest written expression was the Book of Changes or I Ching, a book of divination consisting of sixty-four oracles, thought to date to 3000-1200 BC and still consulted today. The tradition of  Taoism was transmitted from master to pupil by a succession of shaman-sages, many of whom were sublime artists and poets.
           From the source which is both everything and nothing, and whose image is the circle, came heaven and earth, yin and yang—the male and female principles whose dynamic interaction brings into being the world we see and maintains it in balance. The Tao is both the source and the creative process of life that flows from it, imagined as a Mother who is the root of heaven and earth, beyond all yet within all, giving birth to all, containing all, nurturing all.
           The Way of Tao is to reconnect with the Mother source or ground, to be in it, like a bird in the air or a fish in the sea, in touch with it, while living in the midst of the myriad forms that the source takes in manifestation. It is to become aware of the presence of the Tao in everything, to discover and observe its rhythm and its dance, learning to trust it, no longer interfering with the flow of life by manipulating, directing, resisting, controlling. It is to develop a relationship with and intuitive awareness of a mystery which only gradually unveils itself.
           Following the Way of Tao requires a turning towards the hidden within-ness of things, a receptivity to the unseen through contemplation of the seen, enough time to reflect on what is inconceivable and indescribable, beyond the reach of mind or intellect, that can only be felt, intuited, experienced at ever deeper depth. Action taken from this position of balance and freedom will be aligned to the harmony of the Tao and will therefore embody its mysterious power and wisdom, enabling it to act in the world without attachment to action.
           Enlightenment, according to Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, two of Taoism's greatest sages, uncovers unknown powers of the mind. which lie beyond the threshold of normal consciousness. Sudden enlightenment breaks through the habitual structure of consciousness and opens the mind to the powers and insight imprisoned in the depth of the unconscious.
          The Taoists never separated nature from spirit, consciously preserving the instinctive knowledge that although it manifests as a duality, life is One. No people observed Nature more passionately and minutely than these Chinese sages or reached so deeply into the hidden heart of life, describing the life and form of insects, animals, birds, flowers, trees, wind, water, planets and stars. They felt the continuous flow and flux of life as an underlying energy that was without beginning or end, that was, like water, never static, never still, never fixed in separate things or events, but always in a state of movement, a state of changing, becoming and relating.
           They called the art of going with the flow of this energy Wu Wei—not-doing (Wu means not or non, Wei means doing, making, striving after goals), understanding it as the art of relinquishing control, not trying to force or manipulate life but, through an act of conscious observation and connection , attuning themselves to the underlying rhythm and ever-changing modes of its being. The Taoists would never have entertained the idea of targets or goals, other than the mastery of the medium through which they expressed their understanding of the Tao.
           The stilling of the surface mind that is preoccupied with the ten thousand things brings into being a deeper, more complete mind and a meditative state of consciousness and creative power that they named Te which enabled them not to interfere with life but, in their words, to “enter the forest without moving the grass; to enter the water without raising a ripple.”

Fan K'uan - Sung Dynasty

The mind of man searches outward all day
The further it reaches,
The more it opposes itself.
Only those who look inward
Can censor their passions,
And cease their thoughts.
Being able to cease their thoughts,
Their minds become tranquil.
To tranquillize the mind is to nourish one’s spirit.
To nourish the spirit is to return to Nature.
                     
          Tao The Ching 52, trans. Chang Chung-Yuan (1)

           They cherished the Tao with their brushstrokes, observing how it flowed into the patterns of cloud and mist between earth and mountain peak, or the changing rhythm of air currents and the eddying water of rivers and streams, the exquisite opening of plum blossom in spring, the rustling dance of bamboo and willow. They listened to the sounds that can only be heard in the silence. They expressed their experience of the Tao in their paintings, their poetry, their temples, remote mountain retreats and gardens and in their way of living which was essentially one of withdrawal from the world to a sanctuary in the heart of nature where they could live a simple, contemplative life, concentrating on perfecting their brush strokes in calligraphy and painting and their subtlety of expression in the art of poetry. Humility, reverence, patience, insight and wisdom were the qualities that they sought to cultivate.

Out of non-being, being is born;
Out of silence, the writer produces a song. Lu Chi (2)

           The Taoist artist or poet intuitively reached into the secret essence of what he was observing, making himself one with it, then inviting it to speak through him, so releasing the dynamic harmony within it. He imposed nothing of himself on it but reflected the soul of what he was observing through the highly developed skills that he had cultivated over a lifetime of practice. Through the perfection of his art, he did not define or explain the Tao which, as Chuang-Tzu said, cannot be conveyed either by words or by silence, but called it into being so that it could be experienced by the beholder. The Tao flows through the whole work as cosmic Presence, at once transcendent in its mystery and immanent in its form. The distillation of what the Taoist sages discovered is bequeathed to us in the beauty and wisdom of their painting, poetry and philosophy, and in their profound understanding of the relationship between observer and observed and the eternal ground that underlies and enfolds them.
           In A Treatise on Painting, Chuang Huai writes:

Only he who reaches Reality can follow Nature’s spontaneity and be aware of the subtlety of things, and his mind will be absorbed by them. His brush will secretly be in harmony with movement and quiescence and all forms will issue forth. Appearances and substance are caught in one motion as the life breath reverberates through them. He who is ignorant of Reality becomes a slave of passion and his nature will be distorted by externalities. He sinks into confusion and is disturbed by thoughts of gain or loss. He is nothing more than a prisoner of brush and ink. How can he speak of genuine works of Heaven and Earth? (3)

           Whenever I look at one of the great Taoist paintings of the T'ang or Sung dynasties or reading a Taoist poem, I find myself subtly transformed by them, permeated by their vision. They evoke a state of calm, helping me to let go of the things that normally distract the mind — the preoccupation with the ten thousand things that they called “dust.” They relate me instantaneously to the source or ground which unites everything.
           To let go of the need for striving and control, to rest in the quietness of mind and humility of heart that the Taoist sage embodies, is to live in a state of instinctive spontaneity that they named Tzu Jan—a being-in-the-moment that can only exist, as in earliest childhood, when the effort to adapt to collective values is of no importance. What exists is what is. There is no need to change it by imposing the will or trying to manipulate circumstances. Change will come about by changing the quality of one's own being, by consciously re-connecting, moment by moment, with the presence of the source. To feel what needs to be said without striving to say it, to speak from the heart in as few words as possible, to act when action is required, responding to the needs of the moment without attachment to the fruits of action, this was the essence of the Taoist shamanic vision. It is a response to life that is essentially gentle, balanced, dynamic and wise. It is still reflected today in the faces and demeanor of modern sages who live in the mountains of China where, for centuries, retreats have been built as places of contemplation in the midst of a landscape of utter stillness and breathtaking beauty.

moonrise

The wide pond expands like a mirror
The heavenly light and cloud shadows play upon it.
How does such clarity occur?
It is because it contains the living stream
from the fountain. Chu Hsi (4)

Notes
1. Chang Chung-Yuan, Creativity and Taoism, Wildwood House, London 1963
2. from Wen Fu: The Art of Writing translated by Sam Hamill
3. Chuang Huai, A Treatise on Painting
4. from Chang Chung-Yuan, Creativity and Taoism

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CHAPTER TWELVE
Instinct as an Expression of the Soul

La Dame à La Licorne France, 15th century

The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul

                                         — Hildegarde of Bingen

The beautiful tapestry above from the Musée de Cluny in Paris, can be seen as an image of soul (the woman) flanked on each side by the lion and the unicorn, in a landscape filled with images of fruit trees, animals, birds and flowers. Sometimes the series of tapestries is said to represent the five senses. However, to me the lion symbolises the body and the unicorn the spirit. Both are held, so to speak, in the greater field of the soul, personified by the woman standing at the door of the tent. The two banners on either side of her have the crescent moon on them - symbol of the Feminine.
           Looking back over the last two millennia, it is apparent that, during this time, conventional religious teaching did not preserve the ancient insight that nature and instinct are an expression of spirit: in splitting nature from spirit, emptying matter of soul, and contaminating the instincts with guilt and fear, an essential part of our wholeness was lost. It is crucially important now for us to create a conscious, healing and redemptive relationship with these neglected aspects of spirit, within ourselves and within the culture.
          In Christian culture, the soul has been defined as the “spiritual” part of ourselves and as something separate from the body that survives the death of the body. A more inclusive definition of the soul which includes the instinct and the body may seem strange. Yet, in its widest definition I think it is possible to say that the soul is, at one end of the spectrum, the instinctive life of the body and, at the other, the intelligent life of the cosmos. It is impossible to explain this as yet because we have no concepts or words or mathematical equations to describe the relationship between them but it may be that the functioning of instinct on this plane of reality is, in some way, related to the force of gravity at the cosmic level. Some kind of cosmic DNA programmes the life and instincts of all species on this planet.
          The dream that I described in Chapter Two, where I stood at the edge of a deep gorge and saw, rising out of it, an enormous cobra-like serpent with its seven hoods spread out in a great semi-circular fan, shocked me into awareness of the importance of instinct. Without actually seeing this archetypal serpent rising out of the gorge, I don’t think I would have understood instinct to be something so powerfully and overwhelmingly real—something that is at the very root of life and the medium through which we are all of us connected to each other and to the life of the planet—and beyond it—to the life of the cosmos. Even more than this, I could see that this serpent personified the instinctive intelligence embedded within every aspect of the life we have explored and are exploring, active within Darwin’s whole process of evolution on this planet, leading to the evolution of consciousness in our species. Moreover, I could see that it wanted to communicate with me. This indeed, was a very different image of the serpent from that portrayed in the myth of the Fall.
          I had always thought of the soul as the “spiritual” aspect of myself and had tended to look down on the instinct as something inferior to spirit and to mind. It certainly did not occur to me that my instincts could be thought of as a vital expression of the soul or as the root or source out of which my ability to feel, to think, to imagine, to be aware of my thoughts and feelings, had developed. The body to most people is something that is often treated as a kind of servant, doing the will of its “master,” the mind. Yet the body can also be seen as the physical vehicle of the soul—something extraordinary and precious—which emerges out of the invisible, rather as the stem of a flower emerges from the dark depths of the soil or the stars emerge from the darkness of the night sky.
          Our consciousness, as Jung described it, is like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. And that rhizome is the vast realm of instinct which, as I now understand it, is inseparable from the life of the soul. He also said that “dreams, fantasies, compulsions, obsessions are carriers of messages from the unconscious, instinctive part of ourselves to the conscious personality…Their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”(1) It is the act of paying attention to these strange and, to begin with, incomprehensible messages, that helps us to open a door onto everything that has been shut out of our awareness.

The Serpent as an Image of Instinct
          In Christianity, the image of the serpent as an image of instinct is deeply implicated in the role it played in the drama of the Garden of Eden, tempting Eve to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. As the primary symbol of the goddess’s power of regeneration, it was vilified in this myth, punished by God and condemned to bite man’s heel and to be bruised and crushed by it. Unsurprisingly, in the Christian tradition, because of its role in the Myth of the Fall, the serpent came to be viewed as a symbol of evil, even of the devil. Other Western myths of the solar era where the hero overcomes the serpent, such as the myth of Apollo killing the great serpent at Delphi, portray man in a new dominant attitude towards nature.
          Later this image migrates to the battle between the hero and the dragon—the dragon being identified with whoever or whatever was defined as “the enemy” at a particular historical moment but also, in mythology, with the fear of death that the hero has to face and overcome—as when Perseus faced and overcame the Gorgon. But the dragon was also identified with nature that had to be conquered and controlled by man. Following this chain of ideas which derives ultimately from Plato, the body and its instincts also had to be controlled and subdued by the mind. It is extremely difficult to change the long imprinting of these ideas or beliefs on the collective soul of a civilization.
          An altogether different approach is found in the East where the serpent is ubiquitous as a symbol of life’s ability to create and destroy. It is found most strongly represented in the magnificent temples of Angkor in Cambodia and in countless temple sculptures throughout India and south-east Asia. The Buddha is often shown seated on the coils of a gigantic serpent whose seven cobra heads fan out behind him to form a protective canopy. To have the serpent as guardian and guide rather than adversary means that the instinct— unconscious in its primordial state—has been raised and expanded to a fully enlightened state of consciousness.

The Buddha seated on the coils of Mucalinda

          This greatest potential achievement of human consciousness is symbolised in Indian mystical teaching by the journey of the serpent goddess Kundalini from the lowest chakra at the base of the spine to the highest chakra at the top of the head where the twin masculine and feminine conduits of the life energy meet in the central channel—the sushuma—and flower into the crown of the thousand-petalled lotus. The long and arduous journey of the instinct from an unconscious state to a fully conscious one in this dimension accomplishes its transformation from blind instinctive impulse to the highest expression of wisdom and compassion. Yet instinct is not “lower” than consciousness. It is the mighty power which animates and organizes all forms, all patterns of life and all the relationships between them. To create a conscious relationship with this power, coming to know its light and dark aspects, develops the ability to heal and awaken others to their own spiritual or soul potential. In the Buddha’s own words, “Incomparable are the Wake.”

The Importance of the Heart
          The life-bearing energy of the heart rises like a fountain within us to nourish and irrigate the parched soil of soul. As with the physical heart, if the psychic heart is not in a healthy state; if one or more of its arteries is blocked; if the circulatory system is not in good order, then we cannot function at a level of optimum health. When our heart carries wounds, these, like blocked arteries, can restrict the flow of instinctual energy through the psychic circulatory system, leading to the impairment of psychic and physical health. Our heart seeks meaning, relationship, connection. But these feelings associated with our heart are really the more refined or developed expression of age-old instincts and it is these feelings that we need to make more conscious. It is ultimately instinct which carries and transmits to each unique new embryo the whole of the primordial experience of our species encoded in its “psychic” DNA or, to be more specific, the “consciousness” aspect of DNA.

Below are some definitions of how instinct works within us:

· Instinct gives rise to our deepest feelings and our longing to know and understand

· Instinct in our species gives rise to conscience, the instinctive feeling that something is right or wrong, good or evil, helpful or unhelpful

· Instinct is the root of our imagination and our desire to create, prolong and preserve life, to give expression to the creativity of life itself

· Instinct guides and manages the miraculous organism of the body and the balance of the heart-brain axis that maintains the homeostasis of the whole system

· Instinct is the power of attraction that draws us to seek relationship and connection – with each other, with nature, with the cosmos

· Instinct gives us our need for and our response to beauty

· Instinct gives rise to our capacity for empathic relationship with others – the capacity to love and also to hate and fear when the core of our being is wounded or when we are threatened

· Instinct is our innate healing ability to rescue, love, and transform ourselves, to heal the wounds that we and our species carry, once we have understood the need for this

          The sudden opening up to the instinctive core of our being may come in moments of extreme joy—such as the birth of a child, or extreme grief—when someone we love dies, or extreme terror—as when we are face to face with a threat to our life. We can also experience this deeper connection in a sudden opening to the transcendent, an awakening to the eternal and the timeless. At these moments we are lifted out of our “everyday” selves and experience immensely powerful feelings which transcend the normal range of our experience.

The Importance of the Heart in Infancy
          If we knew more about the importance of this instinctive dimension of ourselves, we might be more sensitive to how we treat our children. To understand at least some of the reasons why the instinct and therefore the heart and soul of a child may be wounded at the very beginning of life, I find it helpful and, indeed fascinating, to discover that in the foetus, the heart is the foundation of the nervous system and the development of the bi-cameral brain.

· The nervous system develops from the heart cells, 65% of which are neural cells.
· The brain develops from a mass of undifferentiated heart cells before they form into the four cardiac chambers.
· The right hemisphere of the brain is the first to develop out of the heart cells.
· The heart is connected to all the vital organs of the body.

           Recent research has shown that the well being of the heart is of primary importance to many processes, including cognition. It has over 40,000 sensory neurons. It has its own independent nervous system. The electrical signal of the heart is 60% more powerful than the electrical signal of the brain. The electro-magnetic field of the heart is five hundred times more powerful than that of the brain and in the adult extends ten feet beyond the body. Just putting the hand over the area of the heart changes the brain waves. The heart produces a balancing hormone - oxytocin, the bonding hormone - and this hormone is activated in a loving and nurturing maternal environment. Frustration and fear make the heart rate jagged and rapid. Loving, stroking, caressing the body, make it rhythmic. (2)
           The transcendent experience of intense bliss comes from the older limbic (mammalian) level of the brain. The infant can know these feelings in the womb and in the first few moments of being reconnected with the mother after birth and in close sensory contact with her presence, her touch, her voice, her smell and her body throughout infancy. This original empathic experience is the foundation of later feelings of trust and love, of joy, ecstasy and delight in life.
          We know now that the foetus in the womb registers everything the mother is experiencing - her happiness and delight in her growing child or her distress, fear and anxiety. We know it can be affected by alcohol, smoking and drugs but also by tension and violence in the parental relationship. We know it is sensitive to music, noise and the quality of the environment the mother is experiencing. All these factors can affect the heart and the developing nervous system of the foetus.
          Until the age of three to five years, the neural connections between the older limbic brain and the neo-cortical brain and frontal lobes are not established. Until then, the young child lives through the reflexes of the limbic brain and through purely instinctual behaviour. Between three and five years the neo-cortical level of the brain and the frontal lobes become activated and the child begins to develop a sense of self, a sense of “I.” The memories associated with the older brain levels gradually become “unconscious.” Yet these early memories imprinted on the limbic brain still have immense power to influence our lives and our behavior. A wound to the limbic brain in infancy can programme our lives in negative ways to the end of our days.
          Study after study has shown that emotional and physical abuse of the mother-to-be affects the neuronal circuits of the child she is carrying and that the neglect or abuse of the infant and small child can alter the balance of its neural chemistry and programme it to depression or to violent, even criminal behaviour later on. What happens is that when constant fear or distress is experienced in infancy, the adrenal glands produce a high level of the stress hormone cortisol and this upsets or disturbs the optimal formation and equilibrium of the nervous system, interfering with the neural connections between the heart, the different parts of the brain and the frontal lobes.
          This damage to the nervous system can endure throughout our lives with no way of healing it if we are not aware of it. We need to ask whether the rise in violent crime as well as bullying and aggressive behavior that is increasingly apparent in our culture does not in part originate in foetal and infant distress, contributing to the disorientation of the adolescent in an uncaring and indifferent world and therefore to the arousal of the most primitive survival instincts and the curtailment of the development of neo-cortical skills.
          For example, we are born with 100 billion nerve cells (this may change as we learn more). From three to ten months a culling takes place with the loss of 50,000 connections between brain cells every second. Cells that are not used during this time die. Every cell has several branchings off it called dendrons. The more the cells are used the more connecting dendrons develop. They develop complexity and increase by use. If they aren't used, they can be lost. The mother's holding and responding to her infant in the early months and years is vital to the development of these dendrons. Care and bonding with the mother or primal carer help the cells and dendrons to become active and are absolutely essential in the first ten months. If care and love are absent or deficient, they will not be activated. (3)
           In view of this, I worry that the increasing tendency to put children in nursery school at an earlier and earlier age is having a negative effect on their development. The latest suggestion in the United Kingdom is a plan to get children into nursery schools from the age of two. Psychotherapists are agreed however, that at this age the small child still needs the containing environment of the mother and the home. It is astonishing and disheartening to see that there is still such ignorance of the child’s needs in government departments, however much they may believe they are serving the mother’s needs in “getting her back to work” and however much they may assert that the child’s intellectual development is enhanced. What they don’t usually take into account is the child’s ability to form stable relationships later on in life and the balance and optimum development of the nervous system.

The Right Hemisphere of the Brain
          In the light of recent dramatic breakthrough experiences of certain individuals it seems that the right hemisphere of our brain may be a missing piece in the puzzle of consciousness. These experiences suggest that the right hemisphere is our conduit to what poets, visionaries and mystics of all cultures have called cosmic consciousness, the oneness of being or union with the divine ground. It may be that too great a focus on linear, left hemispheric consciousness has blocked access to the right hemisphere and upset the balance and natural relationship between them. Our modern methods of educating children to develop the sequential thinking of the left hemisphere too early in their lives (before the age of six) may program our whole culture to be unable to develop the right hemisphere and this, in turn, may block access to our feelings, to our heart and our instinctive soul which suffer and atrophy from being “shut out.”
          A neuro-scientist called Jill Bolte Taylor has recently described (in 2008 on Ted) her extraordinary opening to the right hemisphere when her left one was incapacitated by a stroke, reducing her usual capacity for articulate speech to a mumbled series of sounds and grunts. It took her ten years fully to recover her left-brain skills. Her experience was truly revelatory for her and her ability to communicate it, coming from a respected scientist, has impressed and fascinated millions.(4)
          The unconscious drives and patterns of behaviour that we call instinct are a fundamental aspect of the soul’s life. The miraculous interaction of the many systems which together constitute our “bodymind” organism are intrinsic to the soul’s life in this dimension of reality. Memories of happiness and delight or of terror, anxiety and grief which are imprinted on the autonomic nervous system in earliest infancy and early childhood—even in the womb—remain imprinted on the nervous system throughout our lives and can affect the frontal lobes of the brain as these develop, whether positively or negatively. With the development of the frontal lobes comes the ability to reflect, to reason, to apply knowledge gained to specific goals but also to imagine, to make intuitive connections between apparently unrelated things and ideas. But if the instinct is wounded or traumatized, or deflected from a normal path of development by anxiety, this capacity for harmonious and balanced interaction between the three brain systems and the right and left hemispheres will be impaired.

The Split Between the Conscious Mind and Instinct
          We can see everywhere, both in people's personal lives and in the world as a whole, how instinct, acting blindly and unconsciously, brings untold suffering and evil into being, a situation which will be explored in depth in the next chapter. As long as we continue to shut off this instinctual part of ourselves from our awareness, it has the power to take over our fragile “rational” consciousness by triggering unreflecting responses to events that happen to us and by arousing negative responses to other people which may lead us to act aggressively towards them.
          As the split between our conscious mind and the matrix of instinct grows wider, the instincts take on a more dangerous aspect. Instinct can take over not only individuals but a whole culture, driving us along paths that we would not need to take, were we more receptive to its presence and its power and more aware of why it can take on a dangerous or negative aspect. The voice of instinct, cut off from relationship with the conscious mind, can become ever more strident and fanatical as it takes over the personality. Fundamentalism, which today confronts us in many forms, is one example of this. Another example is the corporate greed that has led to the banking collapse. A third is the development of ever more terrifying weapons.
          I am reminded of a passage Jung wrote in his commentary on the Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower where he describes how, as consciousness gains more and more autonomy and independence from the deeper matrix of the instinct, the whole super-structure of consciousness becomes detached from the age-old base or ground out of which it has developed. “Consciousness thus torn from its roots…possesses a Promethean freedom but it also partakes of the nature of a godless hubris.”(5) This unconscious split creates great conflict between the two aspects of the psyche which finds its way into the conflicts that are acted out in the wider arena of the world.

Messages from the Soul
          When I began analysis, I did not know how to recognize and interpret the messages coming from the instinct. But as my understanding developed, I began to observe the ways in which the instinct communicates with us and I began to pay attention to its signals. I learned that it communicates through visions and dreams, through imaginative ideas, through feelings and passionate longings, through subliminal intuitions. It may also try to communicate through powerful emotions of rage, fear and hatred which may lead, in the most deprived sections of the community, to the violent crime and gang culture that is so prevalent in our cities. Millions today live in hideous over-crowded cities, no longer in touch with the earth and the star-strewn night sky as our ancestors were. This in itself does violence to the instincts. Millions are involved in and dependent upon work which does not satisfy them and from which there is no escape.
          The breakdown of families which is, in part, an effect of this disorientation, contributes to a chronic state of anxiety and to patterns of behavior which reflect the distress of the instinct. Boys without a male role model provided by a caring father look to gangs to give them security and status. Girls follow the dubious role models offered to them by media “celebrities” and try to adapt their feminine nature to the masculine ethos of the culture.
          If there is nothing to help us to become aware of or develop insight into this foundation of our life, there is no way in which it can reach us. Nor can we be enriched and developed by a relationship with something that is infinitely more powerful than our small and fragile conscious ego. Cut off from instinct, we become impoverished and diminished because a vital part of our wholeness does not receive the attention it requires and deserves and is has no means of gaining the attention of the conscious mind. We could see the constant images of violence on our television screens as a symptom of a dysfunctional instinct. By portraying traumatising images, we further traumatise it.
          In childhood we are in touch with instinct, living in a state of unconscious fusion with it. If all goes well, we stay connected with it and it guides us through the power of attraction to the right partner and to some kind of work that gives us pleasure and fulfilment. But for countless others, through parental neglect and abuse, shockingly inadequate education, or the exhaustion of the struggle to survive, the instinct and with it the heart, are wounded. As we grow to adulthood, the routine of everyday life becomes burdensome and meaningless, as if the germ of wheat has vanished, leaving only the husk. Many people turn to crime and drugs or fall into depression, not knowing how else to deal with their sense of stress and distress as they are driven from day to day by survival needs and by a sense of failure in the face of the goals our competitive culture imposes on them that they cannot attain.
          Governments try to deal with the symptoms of this distress, manifested in crime and illness of all kinds but the proliferation of new laws, regulations and exhortations does not address and cannot alleviate the underlying problem.
          In The Heart of the Hunter Laurens van der Post tells us that many people would write to him after hearing his lectures about the Bushman, saying they had dreamed about them. A particular dream from one of these letters made such a deep impression on me that I remembered it years after I had read his book:

I had not had a dream for years, but last night after the talk I dreamt I was in a great dilapidated building rather like a neglected castle I once knew. Somewhere inside it a woman was weeping as if her heart would break. I rushed from room to room along corridor after corridor and down stair after stair, trying to find her so that I could comfort her. Everywhere I went was empty; the dust thick on the floor and cobwebs on the wall. I was in despair of ever finding her, though the sound of her weeping grew louder and more pitiful in my ears. Suddenly one of your little Bushmen appeared in the window. He beckoned to me urgently with his bow, indicating that he would lead me to the woman. I started out to follow him, but immediately there was a growl behind me. To my horror one of the fiercest of the wolf hounds which I let loose in the grounds of my house as watch dogs every night, leapt forward and dashed straight at the Bushman. I tried to call the hound back but I could not find my voice. In the struggle to find it, I woke up in great distress and could not sleep again. (6)

          Here are the images of the neglected dimension of the soul—the empty, dust-covered building, the weeping woman. The little Bushman, symbol of the guiding wisdom of the instinct, cannot connect the dreamer with the woman because of the fierce wolf-hound, the Cerberus-like image of the critical, dismissive mind which may bar the entrance to the underworld of the instinctive soul. I knew that this inner controlling critic has to step aside before the Bushman can function as guide and the weeping woman be rescued.
           In compensation for the loss of the priceless treasure of relationship with the deepest aspect of ourselves—the instinctive heart of our being—we may succumb to the values and models of behavior which promote competitiveness, greed and the acquisition of material things. We may copy the model of sexuality presented as a means of exploiting and manipulating another person for our own imagined needs. These secular values may be presented as essential to our happiness but they have nothing to do with the quest for the hidden treasure. Because their superficiality cuts us off from connection to our deepest ground, they draw us into addictive patterns which can destroy our lives and our relationships.

Healing the Wound of Separation
          I like the story of Androcles and the Lion—a story that has stayed with me since I heard it as a child—because it illustrates so clearly how becoming aware of the wounds the instinct carries and healing them brings rich rewards in the arena of life:

          Androcles was a Roman slave who had been taken to North Africa. He tried to escape to the coast and return to Rome. He knew that if he were caught he would be killed, so he waited until the nights were dark and moonless before creeping out of his master’s house and stealing through the town into the open country. He hurried as fast as he could but when day broke he found that instead of reaching the sea coast, he was in a lonely desert. He was tired, frightened, hungry and thirsty. Seeing a cave in the side of some cliffs, he crept into it, lay down and very soon fell asleep. He was awakened by a terrible roaring and to his horror, saw a huge lion standing at the entrance to the cave. Androcles had been sleeping in the lion’s den. There was no escape. The great lion barred the way.
          Androcles waited for the lion to spring on him and kill him but it did not move. Instead, it moaned and licked one of its paws that seemed to be bleeding. Seeing that the animal was in great pain, Androcles forgot his terror and came forward. The lion held up its paw, as if asking for help. Androcles then saw that a great thorn had become embedded in the paw which had cut it and made it swell. He drew the thorn out with a quick movement. Relieved of pain, the grateful lion licked its paw, then limped out of the cave, and in a few minutes returned with a dead rabbit, which it laid at Androcles’s feet. When he had managed to light a fire and cooked and eaten it, the lion led him to a spring of fresh water gushing out of the earth.
          For three years, man and lion lived in the cave, but at last Androcles began to crave the society of his fellow men. He left the cave but was soon caught by some soldiers and sent as a fugitive slave to Rome. There he was condemned to be killed by wild beasts in the Colosseum on the first public holiday.
A vast multitude of spectators came to see the sight, including the Emperor. Androcles was pushed into the great open space and a lance was thrust into his hand. With this, he was told, he was to defend himself against the powerful lion which had been kept for days without food to make it savage and fierce. Androcles trembled when the ravenous lion sprang out of its cage with a terrible roar, and the lance shook in his grasp as the great beast came bounding up to him. But instead of knocking him to the ground with a blow of is paw, it began to lick his hands. Androcles saw to his amazement that it was the same lion with which he had lived in the wilderness. He patted it and leaned on its head and cried.
          All the spectators marvelled at the strange scene and the Emperor sent for Androcles, asking him for an explanation. He was so delighted with the story that he made Androcles a free man.

          Androcles had two encounters with the lion: the first was in the wilderness, the lion’s domain; the second in the Roman arena, symbolically the arena of life. There are, even in this children’s story, undertones of heroic myth telling the story of the man who makes the journey into the wilderness of his soul, there to be reconciled with the instinctual powers symbolized by the lion, whose wound he heals. He then makes the return journey into the world. There, in the fearful arena of life, instead of having his life destroyed by the wounded and enraged animal, he has its support and friendship. To make friends with the lion and to take the thorn out of its paw is to receive the protection and guidance of the instinctual powers of the soul.
           There is a strange saying of Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “Blessed is the lion which the man eats, and the lion may become a man; and cursed is the man whom the lion eats, and the lion will become man.” (logion 8) His words point to the danger of the unconscious instinct “taking over” or “possessing” the conscious personality.
          An extraordinary photograph, published in the newspapers on January 13th, 2007, showed a lion reaching through the bars of its cage to embrace a woman, giving her what looked like a passionate kiss on the lips. Its two paws were tenderly wrapped around her neck, its eyes were shut and it looked for all the world as if it were in a state of bliss. The woman, Ana Julia Torres, is a teacher who lives in Columbia. She had rescued this African lion, called Jupiter, from a circus where it had been mistreated and nursed it back to health. Ten years ago she began to rehabilitate abused animals and now has a centre housing eight hundred lions as well as a variety of other animals. There was something immensely moving about the warmth and tenderness of the lion's spontaneous embrace and the trust of this woman who dared to invite and welcome it, stroking the lion’s thick rough mane for all the world as if it were an enormous dog. It was so perfect an image of the relationship we might have with our instinct, if only we knew how to embrace it and allow it to embrace us, to love it, as in the story of Beauty and the Beast, where the feared beast turns into a prince.
          Many people pass their lives in a state of slavery to misery, illness and depression, or to circumstances they loathe and feel imprisoned by, or in a state of hatred and resentment against something or someone they feel has injured them. These powerful feelings are symbolized by the wounded lion with the great thorn in its paw. If the thorn is not removed, it is likely that the lion will become dangerous. The lives of countless people are destroyed by the enraged and wounded lion that is condemned to roam the wilderness beyond our conscious awareness. Many people are dangerous, even terrifying to live with because of their power to hurt and destroy others.
           The lives of millions of children are blighted by the cruelty of parents, teachers and other adults who carry soul wounds of which they are barely conscious because they cannot remember or acknowledge the effects of the suffering and abuse they themselves experienced as children. They grow up to inflict suffering and abuse on others, acting out their own trauma. Apart from poverty, hunger and AIDS, the greatest problem in the world today is the neglect of children’s emotional needs, not only in the theatres of war but also in the affluent West where broken marriages and serial partners inflict great suffering on children. The poorest child in Africa may receive more love and attention than a Western child with all its technological “toys”.
          If the matrix of instinct and, therefore, the entire nervous system developing out of the heart has been wounded in the early stages of life through the effect of drugs or alcohol taken by the parents, through the constant infliction of physical or verbal violence and abuse or the experiencing or witnessing something horrific, or simply emotional neglect, this unconscious wound is likely to manifest later on in symptoms that are increasingly destructive and compulsive. The more instinctual feelings are shut away from consciousness, the more uncontrollable and overwhelming they become until at last they burst forth in ways that may injure others as well as ourselves. Depression, aggression—perhaps even the psychosis of war that we see today in many parts of the world—are all symptoms of psychic wounds, both individual and collective, which need healing.
          In a culture whose entire focus is on extraverted activity rather than attending to these symptoms of distress coming from the instinctual soul, we have trained ourselves to ignore them, ploughing on through life regardless, never seeing the connection between this repression and the problems that arise in our health and our relationships. Repressed pain and anger may be vented through projection onto our partner, our children or some other person or scapegoat who may take the full brunt of the anger and aggression stemming from unrecognised and untreated wounds. Widening this perspective to humanity as a whole, the increasing aggression and terrorism in today’s world can be read as a symptom of underlying psychic distress in millions of individuals. A capacity for relationship with the soul is available to all of us but may not be activated unless we feel so threatened by our symptoms that we are forced to do something about them. Obviously, the terrible traumas inflicted by war, particularly on the soul of vulnerable and helpless children, enormously magnify the later symptoms of distress in a whole soociety.

Healing the Heart
          As the relationship with the ground of life changes, so do we change in our relationships to partner, child or parent; our understanding of life and other people deepens and expands. Over the course of many years of listening to the voice of the soul, the base metal of a personality which was unaware of the numinous ground on which it rests or the source of the light which gives it life, is transformed into gold as it learns how to engage with this ground as with an invisible partner and friend. Aspects of our psychic life which may, in our unconsciousness, have controlled our lives and our relationships through anxiety, greed, hatred, envy, fear, and a sense of powerlessness which leads to the drive for power over others are slowly transformed as our relationship with the soul grows.
          The purpose of these symptoms is always to draw attention to the state of imbalance in our inner lives, just as the pain of a cut draws attention to the need to treat it. Ultimately, the hidden intention of many different symptoms of imbalance is to make us whole. In becoming whole, we open to the wholeness that our limited, partial consciousness has unknowingly obstructed. As we establish a deeply lived relationship with the soul over the course of many years, it becomes increasingly difficult to live or work in such a way that we injure others or life in general. At the same time, some kind of work that is deeply satisfying manifests, often changing its form in different phases of our lives, but always expressing a love of what we are doing, whether it is helping other people or expressing that love in some kind of creative form.
          Insight into the world of the soul gives us greater understanding of life. We need no longer live unconsciously, reacting blindly to events. We can begin to relate to the great invisible web of being that connects all things to each other, and the spirit that informs the whole, and align our life with this greater life so that, gradually, another perspective comes into being: values develop which do not do violate our instinctive needs or those of others.
          Whenever we have a longing to create something or a passionate attraction to a place or an idea, the soul is making itself known to us through these longings and feelings of attraction. Following the thread of this longing or attraction may lead us in unexpected directions in our lives. The soul carries within it the active intelligence, the intention and the power to transform these unconscious patterns so that humanity can reach its evolutionary goal of a mature, transformed and integrated consciousness. This instinctual soul, focused through the heart and connected to the greater cosmic web of life is the tap root of our imagination and our creativity. Almost as soon as we begin to pay attention to our inner life, it becomes apparent that there is an intelligence in its depths that is infinitely superior to our conscious ego or personality. In relation to this greater intelligence, the surface personality is like a tiny planet compared to the size and radiance of a supernova, and so it will remain to anyone who has had experience of its directing wisdom.
          Whoever ventures into the realm of the soul, will discover, as T.S. Eliot did, that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” She will know that each line of poetry that has stirred the reeds of longing, each image of beauty and fragment of what was felt to be truth has served to reveal, little by little, a presence that has taken humanity millennia to discover, yet has always been there, awaiting the moment of recognition. The measure of commitment that is asked of us by the soul in return for its gift of wisdom and guidance may be only gradually revealed, but the inscription on the lead casket chosen by Bassanio, in the hope of winning the hand of Portia, says it all:

                                                  Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. (7)

Notes:

1. C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols p.52
2. see Heartmath website.
See also See Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger, A Child is Born, Doubleday, p 92. An essential and fascinating that will interest both parents and children
3. Dr. Peter Fenwick, formerly neuro-psychiatrist at the Maudesley Hospital, London. notes from a lecture.
See also Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain, Brunner-Routledge, 2004
4. Jill Bolte-Taylor, Ted transmission, 2008, see book Random House 2009
5. C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 84
6. Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter
7. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Dragon, The Shadow,
and the Primordial Soul

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
New Wine in New Bottles:
A New Image of God

Hubble Image - Nasa

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved. Matt. 9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37,38

The human world of today has not grown cold but is ardently searching for a God proportionate to the new dimensions of a Universe whose appearance has completely revolutionised the scale of our faculty of worship.

                                                  — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man

If it be true, that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man on earth.

                                                  — Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

From the first stirrings of conscious awareness, we have sought relationship with the cosmos. This is perhaps our deepest instinct. Gazing in wonder at the stars, naming the constellations, minutely charting the rising and setting of the moon and the sun, imagining a divine intelligence that has created the beauty and marvel of the earth, and longing to communicate with that intelligence, we have created many sacred images to draw us closer to the mystery. To deny the existence and fascination of this mystery is to go against one of our most powerful and enduring instincts. We seem to need an image of transcendence to focus this instinct yet one of the most problematic issues of our time is the image of God we have inherited from a patriarchal past shared by the three Abrahamic religions.           Three hundred and fifty years ago the Judeo-Christian image of God was still the focus of Western civilization and no-one could imagine life without belief in God. The highest vision of the different religions of what has been named as the Axial Age (beginning about 500 BC) was that we were in the world, yet not entirely of the world and could, through meditative and contemplative techniques, gain access to an invisible dimension of reality that lay beyond the phenomenal world. In the Christian tradition, through prayer, we could ask God or Christ or the Virgin Mary to intercede in our lives. We could live a godly life, following the model of compassionate service offered by Christ. We could trust in the teaching of the Church that our sins had been redeemed by Christ’s sacrificial death and that, at our death, we would be united with Christ in His kingdom.
          Then came the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the gradual repudiation or weakening of this great meta-narrative. It had begun to fade under the impact of the publication (after his death in 1543) of the major work of the Polish astronomer Copernicus that the earth moved round the sun, so displacing the established belief that the earth was stationary and placed at the center of the solar system.(1) His discovery shattered the long-established Ptolomaic system and the belief in an ordered cosmos where the earth occupied the intermediate space between heaven above and hell below.
          The second impact was Newton’s formidable discoveries and the development from these of the idea of a mechanistic “clockwork” universe. The third was Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and his totally different reading of the appearance of man on this planet from that of Genesis. As with Copernicus’s great discovery, Darwin’s findings appeared to invalidate the Christian meta-narrative of the story of Creation and the Fall of Man and therefore the need for redemption by the sacrificial death of Christ. His theory seemed to undermine the need for the existence of God, or at least, the Biblical concept of God.
          Darwin’s theory inaugurated a great age of discovery as scientists working in different fields began to explore the geological, biological and anthropological history of the planet. While science had begun to diverge from religion as a result of the persecution of Galileo, it began to replace religion as the purveyor of new and exciting discoveries that could be tested and proven by scientific methods.
          Yielding to the pressure of a new secular philosophy Christianity began to weaken. In 1867, Matthew Arnold in his poem Dover Beach wrote of the “long withdrawing roar” of the tide of Christianity. Within a hundred years the tide of faith had withdrawn so far that there was nothing to aspire to beyond the pursuit of the aims that now dominate modern secular culture. Within a few generations, the older vision seems to have vanished into thin air as the image of a transcendent reality faded. Reason, it was thought, would replace Faith.
          The combined influence of Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx in the late nineteenth century laid the foundation of a new secular meta-narrative: This world is the only one we need to recognize. There is no other world. There is no need to pray to God. There can be no expectation of union with God or Christ after death because there is no God and no afterlife. Recognizing the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution, Nietzsche in his introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra, asked the question: “Have you not heard that God is dead?”           
         

The Breakdown of the Old Meta-narrative
          This was the general cultural atmosphere which as a young woman I found so perplexing and unsatisfying, having, through my travels in the East, encountered the idea that there was an enlightened state of mind or state of consciousness which could be reached through contemplation, meditation and a gradual attunement to an invisible ground of being.
          There seemed to be nothing in the secular West that could bring me to this level of being, no path to follow other than that of conventional Christianity with its emphasis on belief, worship and charitable works or the path of science with its exploration of the physical world. The direct experience of the numinous was never mentioned in Sunday sermons. There was an emptiness, a longing for something that was missing at the heart of both religion and secularism, an answer to the perennial human questions: What is the meaning of my existence? Why are we here? Why is life so full of evil and suffering? I became aware that thousands like myself were on a quest to answer these questions, to fill the vacuum left by the deconstruction of the old image of God and a weakening of the moral values that had guided Christian culture for centuries, however much these had been tarnished by the predatory emphasis on territorial conquest and the unbridled acquisition of wealth and power.
          At that time millions of people including myself were turning away from the established religions of the West because they no longer evoked a response in our soul. For many they were too literal, too remote from ourselves, too male and paternal, too tied up with the inflexibility of dogma, too ignorant and intolerant of other traditions, too fanatically convinced of the infallibility of their own. Seeking a direct relationship with spirit, people turned to shamanic traditions and to the writings of the mystics. Many, like myself, traveled to the East to explore other traditions. Women went in search of what has long been missing in the patriarchal image of God—the feminine dimension of the divine and the feminine values of relationship and nurturing which are so difficult to honor in a culture intent on “targets”, “progress”, “growth” and voracious consumerism.
          A huge vacuum was left by the weakening of the older myth or meta-narrative and into this poured the secular ideologies which ravaged the world in the twentieth century. The Utopian ideologies of Communism and Hitler’s vision of a Third Reich seduced millions of individuals into subscribing to beliefs which brought enslavement and death to millions of others. The men who promoted them became inflated with a god-like omnipotence as have contemporary leaders of whatever faith who claim to be guided by God and have unconsciously identified themselves with the power of the missing archetype. Edward Edinger comments on the danger of this situation in his book, The Creation of Consciousness – Jung’s Myth for Modern Man,

The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilled and drains away, soaked up by the surrounding undifferentiated matter. Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. (3)

          In a predominantly secular culture, it has become fashionable to dismiss religious beliefs as the residue of primitive and outgrown superstition. While I have sympathy with the secularist position I am concerned that if we do away with God and a transcendent order, we are left with man’s idea of what creation should be and man’s dream of manipulating creation to serve his own interests and needs. Whatever the abuses of it by religions which have claimed to know the will of God, the transcendent image has given us a moral compass to forge the values which could protect humanity from the dangerous hubris—the “god-almightiness”—of the secular dream as well as the undoubted distortions of the religious dream.

The Death of God?            

Head of God Winchester Cathedral

          The great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, writes in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space that from time to time, the image of God has to die if it is not to become an idol. It has, he says, to become transparent to transcendence in order to be renewed.(4) The same theme is reflected in the image of the death of the Old King that is found in many alchemical treatises. In our time the Old King may be identified not only with an outworn image of God but an outworn worldview and a system of values - part religious, part secular - that can no longer provide an adequate container for the soul of a whole civilization. No wonder the great Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) prayed to God to be saved from God and said “Man's last and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God.”
          Once again, as in the early centuries of the Christian era, it seems as if new bottles are needed to hold the wine of a new revelation. As Jesus pointed out two thousand years ago, bottles become worn out and have to be replaced. But how do we create the vessel which can assimilate the wine of a new vision of reality and a new image of God? How do we relinquish the dogmatic beliefs and certainties which have, over the millennia of the patriarchal era, caused indescribable and quite unnecessary suffering and the sacrifice of so many millions of lives? I cannot answer these questions. But I know that as the new understanding, the new wine comes into being, we have to hold the tension between the old and the new.
          It must have been like this two thousand years ago when the disciples of Jesus tried to assimilate what he was telling them, something so utterly different from the belief-system and the brutal values that governed the world of their time. Those new teachings and those different values seem barely to have touched the consciousness that currently governs the world, however much political and religious leaders proclaim their allegiance to them.           
          

Vierge Ouvrante

          Much of what was lost to Christianity during the early centuries of persecution has been recovered, including the important Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. (5) But there is as yet no cultural vessel to receive this recovered material, no way in which it can be integrated or married with the orthodox religious traditions because these cling tenaciously and even fanatically to the literal interpretation of revelatory texts written down centuries and millennia ago.
          The level of consciousness so far attained by “believers” does not seem strong enough to tolerate a change in the image of God; yet if the image of the divine does not change so that there is a better balance between the masculine and feminine archetypes, it seems doubtful that human consciousness can evolve further, either because it is in thrall to an unbalanced image of God or to the atheism that repudiates the whole idea of God. We now know why the feminine dimension of God was repudiated by the patriarchal religions but it does seem astonishing that none of the three patriarchal religions appears to question the adequacy of the concept of God they have inherited from the past. In this image of the Vierge Ouvrante we are given a startling inversion of the usual image of God where both God and Christ are contained within the Virgin. As Susanne Schaup points out in her book Sophia, Aspects of the Divine Feminine:

The image of God in Western religion, including Judaism and Islam, is a masculine one, despite all protests to the contrary, and as such is a direct cause of the devaluation of the Feminine and feminine priorities in our culture...That which gives a culture legitimacy is, ultimately, its underlying concept of God. If this concept does not change, nothing can actually change…No scientific, ecological, or social paradigm shift can take effect, as long as the theological paradigm does not change along with it.(6)

           Despite the efforts of many to“marry” a feminine image of deity with the masculine one and the world-wide change of consciousness that is gathering momentum in relation to our relationship with the planet, it is nevertheless a fact that the world is still ruled by a patriarchal and increasingly secular mindset, whether we look at religion, politics, science or economics. The great nations of the world are still competing with each other for power and resources—even those becoming available through the melting of the Arctic ice-cap—rather than coming together to serve the whole planetary organism. There is as yet no political consensus about how to work together and how to formulate different values.
          It seems as if we are living through a tumultuous interregnum, made critically dangerous because of our immeasurably enhanced capacity to destroy each other and irreparably damage the fabric of life on this planet. While the “death of God” has been welcomed by a secular culture, this fact nevertheless creates in many people an unconscious anxiety and a deep fear of the void, and gives rise to a moral vacuum as well as to a defensive fundamentalist position in both religion and secular science. The Jihadist who believes that it is God's will that Islam should conquer the world may have its be derived from this fear. The roots of the tendency to polarize lie deep in our solar past but they are strengthened whenever there is a situation which arouses uncertainty and anxiety.
          It may not be God who has died but rather the image we have projected onto Him, an image that was formulated by a male priesthood according to the level of understanding at a specific historical time. It may be that “God” is longing for release from His imprisonment in the strait-jacket of our beliefs. Or, to use a gardening metaphor, “God” has become pot-bound, constricted by the anthropomorphic, gender-biased, paternalistic image that was projected onto Him millennia ago. As Teilhard de Chardin suggested, we need to formulate a new image of God, a new cosmology that is related to the phenomenal discoveries of science which have revealed the vast dimensions of the universe. We also need one that can reunify the polarized aspects of life: spirit and nature. As Teilhard pointed out, “Something seems to have gone wrong in the way God is represented to man. “Man would seem to have no clear picture of the God he longs to worship.”(7)
          Mythologically speaking, as the prevailing myth of our civilization wanes, dies and disappears into the underworld of the collective unconscious, it could be said that we are living through a lunar phase of death or darkness. “We are,” as the historian of culture Thomas Berry comments, “in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”(8) In mythic terms, we are waiting for the rebirth of the moon and for a new myth which could unite the whole of humanity.
          During the phase of darkness however, we are still living under the spell of the solar meta-narrative described in Chapters Four and Six—the Promethean myth of progress and the mastery of nature through the power of science and technology. This meta-narrative has no relationship with a transcendent dimension. The human mind is the supreme value. “Progress” serves the perceived needs of our species alone. In its hubristic stance, this secular meta-narrative has banished the unknown, unexplored, transrational aspect of life and of our own nature. Yet this secular meta-narrative has developed out of the belief enshrined in the Book of Genesis that God has given us dominion over the earth.
          Jung foresaw this situation in his book, Psychology and Religion, East and West. He understood that Nietzsche’s phrase “the Death of God” was not to be taken literally, any more than the doctrines of the Church about the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection of Christ were to be taken literally, but described a profound transformation that was at work in the depths of the modern psyche. Addressing the need for the emergence of the Christian myth in a new form, and offering a new mythical and symbolic interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection, he wrote,

The myth says he [Christ] was not to be found where his body was laid. "Body" means the outward, visible form, the erstwhile but ephemeral setting for the highest value. The myth further says that the value rose again in a miraculous manner transformed. The three days' descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. The fact that only a few people see the Risen One means that no small difficulties stand in the way of finding and recognizing the transformed value. (9)

The image of God inherited from the Patriarchal Religions

God creating Earth Giovanni de Paolo

           We now know that over the millennia of the solar era, the image of deity changed from the primordial Great Mother of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras to many goddesses and gods and finally, in the three patriarchal religions of the solar era, to the image of a single Father God. Throughout this time, whatever the religion, the sacred image gave us a vertical axis, an Archimedean point beyond ourselves to which we could relate, keeping us in touch with the Source from which we have come.
          I think we can understand that, as our species evolved out of nature and as our human consciousness evolved out of the matrix of instinct, the sacred image and the mythologies which grew up around it were like an umbilical cord holding us in touch with the foundation of life. But, at the same time, as we moved into the solar age and the monotheistic god-image of the patriarchal religions, the older relationship with the earth was gradually lost and with it the idea that the whole of nature was infused with divinity, alive with spirit. The image of God we have inherited from the patriarchal past portrays a God creating the earth from a distance, beyond the created world and ourselves.
          During the solar age, the literal interpretation of the myth of the Fall and the doctrine of original sin cast a pall over our lives and led us to look upon the earth as a fearsome place of punishment, suffering, toil and death. I think it was these two linked beliefs that cut us off from the kind of connection with nature that we once had (in the Neolithic era) and that the indigenous peoples have retained in certain parts of the world.
          The ramifications of these beliefs are enormous and I have tried to explore some of them in earlier chapters and leave the reader to reflect on them – relating them to the current political situation where all three Abrahamic religions and the peoples who have embraced them are embroiled in conflict in the area of the planet where, long ago, they originated.
          The Christian meta-narrative, arising out of the matrix of Judaism, emphasized an image of God as a loving Father, concerned for the well being of each and every creature—even the humble sparrow. Christ himself became a new God-image—unifying divinity and humanity in his person and offering a template to humanity of what all men and women could become by discovering and manifesting the latent divinity within their nature through opening a direct relationship with that mysterious ground. Yet this great revelation which pointed to the further evolutionary potential of humanity, already highly developed in the Eastern traditions, was deflected into a new religion in which Christ’s sacrificial death was interpreted as being offered for the redemption of the sins of the world and, specifically, for Christians who had been baptised into the faith. The emphasis was on faith and belonging to a group with a superior revelation rather than on transformation.

The Split between Spirit and Nature
          The image of God we have inherited from the Iron Age portrays God creating the Earth from a distance; God as something transcendent to, different and separate from creation and ourselves. I think we needed the image of a transcendent principle to help us with the immensely long and difficult process of differentiating ourselves from the matrix of nature and to focus on the idea of a goal towards which we were moving, which was, so to speak, transcendent to ourselves, holding, like the potential form of the oak within the acorn, the future potential of our consciousness as a species. But this image became embedded in belief systems which fixed the god-head in the image of a transcendent Father and rejected or failed to include both the feminine dimension of the divine and the idea that material creation, including the body, is a theophany—a showing forth or manifestation of a divine ground or source. How then could human life, human experience, be valued and honoured as something precious, something sacred, a vehicle of divinity? How could the life of the earth and all its species be respected?
          What have we done to God? Like a conjurer demonstrating his skills, we have cut God in two and have utterly lost the sense of the divinity of nature. We have fixed the image of deity in the masculine gender, refusing until very recently to entertain the idea that the feminine aspect of spirit is essential to the completion and balance of the image of deity and therefore to the balance of a civilization.
          The problem may not lie with God but how we use God to serve our own ends. Christians (to focus on one religion) have believed that God ratified their prejudices in their persecution of women, homosexuals, blacks (slavery) and people with a different belief system from their own, whether Jews, Muslims or the indigenous people of different continents (India, China, Africa, North and South America). They have claimed that the Christian revelation was superior to that of others, and have tried to convert people to the “true” path to God, proclaiming that belief was the path to redemption and that “outside the church there is no salvation.”
          For centuries they persecuted shamans, visionaries, prophets, mystics and all those who might have introduced us to a different experience of spirit. Meister Eckhart, one of Christianity’s greatest mystics, would have been burnt at the stake if he had not fortunately died before the Church could implement a trial and a sentence of death. What is there in the actual behavior of so-called Christian nations that justifies their claim to be superior? Where was their compassion towards the peoples they conquered? Or, until very recently, their respect for the earth?
          For all its extraordinary achievements in holding society together in a shared vision, the abuse of God and God’s creation has been a major flaw throughout the history of patriarchal religion. With the “death” of God proclaimed by a secular culture, many of these old habits and beliefs are being challenged. Yet still we hear religious leaders condemning contraception and homosexuals and excluding women priests in the name of God. We even hear them speaking of the “redemption of sexuality.” Like the Islamic fundamentalists, they seem to have conflated ancient tribal custom and human prejudice with divine command.
          From these few examples, Christianity seems to have descended into a cult rather than a spiritual path of awakening to relationship with a deeper reality. What use is belief if it does not lead to a deepening of our understanding and compassion? And what use is the continued worship of God’s sacrificed Son if nothing fundamentally changes in our habits of behavior? Would Christ have approved of weapons of mass destruction? Of Hiroshima? Of depleted uranium and the bombing of Baghdad?          
         The power of religious institutions over the collective psyche of believers is still immense. Any deviation from the given belief may still be viewed as punishable by God, bringing retribution in the form of terrible natural disasters like the tsunami of 2004 or diseases like AIDS. Imams in Sumatra told their congregations that the tsunami was a punishment from God for the sexual sins of the women in their community. Women are murdered in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere for dressing inappropriately or condemned to death by stoning. Religious conformity is imposed by threat of death.
          Even though each religion was, in principle, against killing, in practice many religions were and still are prepared to accept the killing of others if the political or religious imperative seems to demand it.
          The literalist reading of the Book of Revelation has led fundamentalist Christians eagerly to anticipate Armageddon, the final battle at the “End-Times” which is to be the precursor of the “Rapture” and Second Coming of Christ. Shi’a Muslims await the return of the Mahdi in the same expectation of a New Order. Ultra-orthodox Jews await the Messiah. All accept mass sacrifice in the final battle between the forces of light and darkness as a necessary preliminary to the arrival of a new order. Only the “Chosen” will be saved.
          When literalist beliefs take over the collective psyche, aroused in a credulous public by fanatical priests, they can override the highest values of that religion and cast what can only be described as a spell on the psyche of those who claim to believe in God. All this perversion has arisen from a mistaken concept of what deity is—the worship of an idol rather than true insight into the nature of divinity.
          Yet when read as metaphor rather than the Word of God, these prophecies about the end of the world and the coming of a Messiah could be understood as referring to the raising of the consciousness of the whole of humanity rather than predicting the appearance of a single redeemer who will impose a new order. Rabbi David Cooper writes in his book, God is a Verb, “Kabbalists say that we are rapidly approaching another major paradigm shift in awareness. It will be called messianic consciousness, and we will understand everything in an entirely new light.” (10)

The Influence of the East
          From the 1950’s more and more people, disillusioned with Christianity, began to travel to the East in search of the wisdom enshrined in the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism and Taoism. From these they learned methods of meditation which could open a direct path of communion with a transcendent dimension of reality—a path to the experience of enlightenment. As I had done on my two journeys to the East, they encountered a radically different image of spirit and the concepts of karma and reincarnation. They absorbed the idea that suffering arises not from original sin but from unconsciousness or ignorance of the divinity which is the ground of all life.
          Many eastern texts became available in excellent translations for a new and interested audience. The celebrated poems of Rumi drew a cult following. Tsultrim Allione drew attention to extraordinary women in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in her book Women of Wisdom (1984) Aldous Huxley’s books opened the door to the recovery of the shamanic traditions of indigenous people. Publishers sprang up who specialised in these books. Anthologies of Eastern texts were compiled.
          The invasion of Tibet by China in 1950 forced many Tibetan monks to flee to India, America and Europe. Some learned English and other languages, became renowned teachers, and wrote books which had a considerable impact on Western culture. Sogyal Rimpoche’s book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, for example, was widely read. They brought with them new methods of healing and meditation and offered an enormous enrichment of different approaches to healing the sickness of body and soul. The Dalai Lama is recognized by millions as the greatest spiritual leader in the world today.
          California was for many years a focus for the development of these ideas, practises and contemplative methods of the East and a center for the spiritual development of the individual; but Europe also benefited as Tibetan monks established temples and teaching centers in several countries, bringing Buddhism to many thousands of people looking for a different approach to spirituality. The Vietnamese monk Thich Naht Hahn established a renowned center in France. The Maharishi Mahesh Yoga attracted thousands to follow his method of Transcendental Meditation and established a center in England.
          People began to seek out new methods of healing such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, reflexology and Chinese Herbalism, as well as Ayurvedic medicine and the already well-established approach of Homeopathy. Despite the sometimes virulent opposition of established medicine to these methods of healing, thousands of men and women have now trained in them and millions are being treated by them. The focus of this approach to healing is on an empathic holistic attitude which treats body and mind as a single organism. These different influences began to have an impact on the vacuum left by the deconstruction of the image of God inherited from the patriarchal past.

Part 11 - The Search for a Unified Vision: Healing the Wound in the “Body” of God
          Many years ago I had a dream that I was walking in a wilderness of rock and shale, a landscape similar to one above the tree line of the Alps. Suddenly I heard a faint voice crying, “Help me. Help me.” I looked around but could see no-one. The cry was repeated and seemed to come from the ground at my feet. I looked down and saw a tiny leather purse lying in the dust, almost hidden among rocks and boulders. I picked it up and opened it. Inside was a small stone and it was from this that the voice was coming. Does a stone have consciousness? I wondered. Can it communicate with me in words? “Why not?” I thought. “How can I help you?” I asked the stone, as it warmed to the touch of my hand. It gave me no answer then but the urgency of its plea haunted me. I had to find out what needed help and how I could help.
          Finally, I understood that what needed help was the consciousness that is buried in the deepest aspect of our psychic life as well as in the densest aspect of matter that we believe has no consciousness—a lost aspect of spirit that has not been recognised as spirit, something that asks to be redeemed from a state of immolation and fragmentation created by our ignorance. The image of spirit inherited from the past may from time to time need to be discarded but the archetype of spirit will always be re-discovered in a new form, incorporating aspects of itself that may have been split off or excluded by our too limited understanding.
          Years after this dream, when I was researching the history of Kabbalah, I found this passage in a translation of a text written by the sixteenth century Spanish Kabbalist, Moses Cordovero:

The essence of divinity is found in every single thing - nothing but it exists. Since it causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything else. It enlivens them; its existence exists in each existent.

Do not attribute duality to God. Let God be solely God…Do not say, “This is a stone and not God.” God forbid! Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity… Nothing is devoid of its divinity. Everything is within it; it is within everything and outside of everything. There is nothing but it. (12)

           These words seem to resonate with the words of Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “Cleave the wood and there I am; Lift a stone and there am I.” (logion 77) I feel that the insight that the essence of divinity is found in every single atom of life is precisely what has been missing in our concept of God and it is this which has led to the split between spirit and nature and, ultimately, to that between religion and science as well as our growing capacity to inflict destruction on each other and on planetary life.

Nature as a Theophany
          Amazingly, in the ninth century, there was a most beautiful and clear exposition of nature as the expression or theophany of spirit. This concept flourished in Celtic Christianity until this branch of Christianity was superseded (after the Synod of Whitby in AD 664) by the Roman or Catholic version of Christianity. Yet it must have survived for John Scotus Eriugena (810-877), a renowned Irish scholar and Neo-Platonist who lived at the royal court in France for many years, wrote an extraordinary book called Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae. I first came across this book many years ago when I was studying medieval history at Oxford and it made a deep impression on me at the time. But I did not realize its significance and its relevance to our times until recently, when I came across these electrifying words which eradicate the split between creator and creation:

We should not understand God and creation as two different things, but as one and the same. For creation subsists in God, and God is created in creation in a remarkable and ineffable way, manifesting Himself and, though invisible, making Himself visible, and thought incomprehensible, making Himself comprehensible, and although hidden, revealing Himself, and, though unknown, making himself known; though lacking form and species, endowing Himself with form and species; though superessential, making Himself essential...though creating everything, making Himself created in everything. The Maker of all, made in all, begins to be eternal and, though motionless, moves into everything and becomes all things in all things.(13)

          Eriugena’s book was condemned by the Church because it was thought to promote the idea of pantheism—that God was present in nature. Fortunately, his book survived although he himself is thought to have been murdered when he returned to England.

New Wine in New Bottles
          Over the past fifty years a gradual restoration of a sense of the sacred has been taking place beneath the surface of our culture, called forth by the multi-faceted crisis of our times. Now, through the awakening power of the ecological movement, we are invited to enter a new era, where nature—the life of the earth—can once again be recognized as sacred as, in the Neolithic era, it once was. This need not be expressed in religious terms; it is more an instinct than a belief. Survival needs are being focused on the awareness of our dependence upon the well-being of the greater organism of the planet.
          This new focus is beginning to heal the great split between spirit and nature or wound in the body of God which has so tragically flawed the three patriarchal religions and the whole solar era. However, because neither religion nor science are aware of the origin of this split and its influence on our attitudes and our behavior, neither seem able adequately to engage in this process of awakening and to address the immense challenges we face today. Something beyond either needs to come into being—a new meta-narrative, a new worldview. As in the medieval story of the Grail where Parsifal, after many trials, heals the wound of the Fisher King by simply asking the right question, “What ails thee, Father?”, perhaps we need to ask the same question of our whole culture.
          Joseph Campbell recognised the need for a new myth when he wrote: “The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?”(14) And he answered the question by saying that the new myth is that earth is the country that all people belong to and that the earth itself belongs to the cosmos. He would have agreed with the astronaut Edgar Mitchell when he said that his view of the earth from space was a glimpse of divinity. For Campbell, the view of earth seen from space in 1969 was the new revelation, although he would not have used that word. But he saw that this vision of earth gave us an image of the cosmic entity to which we belong, that could evoke our love and respect, taking us beyond the divisions and rivalries that veil our essential relationship to each other and our planetary home.
          Like Campbell, thousands, if not millions of individuals today are searching not only for the unified field in science but for a unified vision of life—a unified vision of spirit, earth and humanity that could be in time to mitigate the catastrophic effects of our fragmented view of life. The birthing of this vision asks us to relinquish many cherished beliefs—ultimately a fundamental transformation of our values. Our knowledge about the world and the universe is accelerating geometrically. We are overwhelmed with information about every aspect of what we observe. The microscope and the telescope have enormously extended the range of our vision and our power to control our lives, yet we understand almost nothing about the mystery of why we are here and what the role of our species on this planet might be.
          Suppose the source we come from is attracting us back to itself, helping our consciousness to connect with it, to evolve further? There is today a crying need for a new way of living and relating to each other and the cosmos. This need, emanating from the core of our being, is urging us to break through the veil separating our consciousness from the consciousness of the cosmos. It is brilliantly reflected in a poem written in 1945 by Christopher Fry in his play called A Sleep of Prisoners.

The human heart can go the length of God,
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere.
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size,
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake
But will you wake for pity's sake?

          The old idea that we are separate from God is breaking, cracking, beginning to move. A regenerative spring is urging us to take the longest stride of soul we have ever taken into the heart of God. The extraordinary discoveries about the size, complexity and incredible beauty of the universe are opening the door to a new meta-narrative, a new way of living and relating to each other and the universe. This dawning meta-narrative is bringing about a breakdown of old beliefs, old images of God and nature and our own human nature. It is challenging our political and economic structures, our enslavement to obsolete beliefs and atavistic habits of behavior. It is awakening the heart, the soul, often through means which may appear destructive, threatening.           Sometimes, as many people working in the field of psychotherapy know, there has to be a breakdown before there can be a breakthrough. The deconstruction of the old image of God may be one aspect of that necessary breakdown. However, there is a risk that breakdown could also precipitate a regression to a more unconscious state. We could lose the priceless treasure of civilization. Everything depends upon whether we assist or resist the process of death and regeneration that is taking place within ourselves and our culture. It is a time of awesome responsibility.
          The problem now is that the culture is in a dilemma. Part of it, particularly that concerned with established institutions, whether religious or political, is still acting from the old solar paradigm of the separation of spirit and nature. It still thinks in terms of competition between nation states. It is still hypnotized by the idea of progress, intent on conquering and controlling nature and exploiting the resources of the planet for the financial gain of a few individual nations, corporations and individuals and for the benefit of the human species alone. It glories in the technological achievements of science but neglects to address the poverty and anguish of billions of people and the disastrous effects of the burgeoning growth of the human population on the life of the planet.
          The other part is rapidly learning how to think in global terms, understanding that our species cannot be separated from the planetary biosphere. It realizes that nationalist power struggles are becoming increasingly obsolete and dangerous and that war is no longer an option for us. It regards our weapons and the colossal sums of money spent on them as something truly demonic.
          The deep malaise in society may help us to grow beyond the current secular mind-set and beyond the religions of the past which carry so much dead wood, towards a new spirituality and a new god-image which unifies the two great archetypes of life. This new spirituality which incorporates the best aspect of the great religious traditions of the past including the indigenous traditions could open the door to a new understanding of our role in the cosmic drama.
          Supposing you were God. How would you make yourself known to humanity at this present time? Revelation can come through the visions and dreams of individuals but it can also come through questioning the doctrines and beliefs that we have received as “revelation” from the past.
          Every mystical tradition says that at the core of our being, we are one with the divine. We are one with the immensity we contemplate. Each teaches that the eye of the heart—the eye which perceives with gnosis or insight into the nature of reality—can only slowly open to awareness of this mystery. The ground has to be well prepared to hold the revelation of this vision and the preparation for it requires much time for contemplation as well as a growing respect and love for all aspects of life. The great Indian sage Sri Aurobindo writes about this slow illumination of the soul in his book, The Life Divine:

As the crust of our outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the nature and stuff of consciousness refines to a greater subtlety and purity and the deeper psychic experiences…become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance.(15)

          What seems to be happening to us now is that a new or perhaps very ancient understanding of spirit is dawning on us. Although it is not yet fully conscious, the realization that our brain acts both as a receiver and transmitter for a greater field beyond our “normal” range of awareness is leading us to the point where we may be able to say, as Arjuna says to Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita: “Thou art the Knower within me and the One to be known. By Thee alone this universe is pervaded. Overjoyed am I to see what I have never seen before.”
          Years after I encountered this very different Indian concept of spirit, I found this comment in a book called Science and the Sacred, by an Indian physicist and philosopher called Ravi Ravindra, until recently Professor of Comparative Religion and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax:

The one central insight into Truth to which all Indian wisdom points is the oneness of all that exists. This is not something alien to the sages in other cultures; but in India all the great sages again and again return to this insight. In fact the realization of this truth is what defines the greatness of a person in India…And the realization of this truth is held as the purpose of human existence. All art, philosophy and science, if they are true, reflect this vision and aid its realization…Over a period of at least four thousand years, the sages in India have repeatedly said that there is an underlying unity of all that exists, including everything we call animate or inanimate, and that the cultivation of wisdom consists in the realization of this truth.(16)

          In the light of this different understanding of spirit, spirituality invites us to focus more on the experience of illumination than on faith and belief, although belief may initially be a path which can lead to illumination. Many people in the West are discovering, through the direct revelation of spirit, that the experience of spirit is utterly different from what they had accepted as “truth” in the past. In these discoveries there is no division of God. There is nothing outside God. Nor is there any separation between ourselves and God except our inability to see reality as it is. During the solar era, we have learned to think of spirit and matter as separate, but maybe there is no essential separation between them nor between what is unseen and what is seen.
          We need an image of God which is related to these insights. Of all the challenges we have to face, this is one of the most difficult, because it means that we have to relinquish a structure of thought or meta-narrative by which we have lived for millennia. There is huge resistance to change because instinctively, we perceive change as a threat to our survival and it is safer to stay with the known rather than forge a path into the unknown.
          The mystics of all the great cultures of the past discovered that our consciousness can interact with the invisible field or ground they named God, Brahman, the Tao, or simply, Light, Divine Darkness or the Void. In our normal state we cannot initiate or perceive this interaction, but this does not mean it does not exist.
          The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the Christian and Sufi mystics, all suggest that spirit can, ultimately, only be known or apprehended experientially, and that spirit is omnipresent, at once transcendent to and immanent within the forms of life: we are bathed in, permeated by spirit every moment of our existence, in every breath we take, in the thirty to a hundred trillion cells of our physical organism.(17) There is no better text to describe this fusion of the human and the divine than the Bhagavad-Gita. Here is Krishna, speaking to Arjuna:

I am the one source of all: the evolution of all comes from me.
I am beginningless, unborn, the Lord of all Worlds.
I am the soul which dwells in the heart of all things.
I am the beginning, the middle and the end of all that lives.
I am the seed of all things that are:
And no being that moves or moves not can ever be without me. (18)

          I don't think we can really understand ourselves unless we understand the history of the evolution of consciousness and begin to bring together the different branches of knowledge that have developed with such extraordinary rapidity during the last hundred or so years.
          As we discover the incredible story of the evolution of planetary life and our own very recent appearance in it, the realization is dawning that we are participating in a cosmic consciousness or intelligence which is co-inherent with every particle of our being and every atom of matter. If we connect these ideas to God, then God or Spirit or Divine Mind is not something transcendent to ourselves. We are co-inherent with It, at the very heart of It. To co-inhere means to be together with, to abide together.
          This realization calls for a huge shift of awareness in our values. If God or Spirit is not something separate from ourselves, something transcendent to nature and planetary life, but is the intelligence and energy of the life process itself, flaring forth at every instant in every region of the vast universe as well as in ourselves, then how we treat so-called “inanimate” matter, planetary life and each other becomes a matter of how we are treating God. It transforms obedience to God's commands into love for God's creation.

The Immanence of Spirit in this Dimension
          Could we perhaps understand the story of our evolution on this planet as the story of the “incarnation” of cosmic spirit in our time and space, the story of its long evolutionary journey through stages of greater and greater complexity and diversification ( as described by Darwin and others) and its awakening, through our own human consciousness, to awareness of itself on this specific planet? Seen in this way, the whole evolutionary process of the universe becomes a divine drama, the drama of spirit incarnating in (from our perspective) the infinitely slow process of the forging of consciousness in the crucible of planetary life, and then constrained within the limitations of that consciousness until it can reach the point of awakening and self-awareness. Cosmic consciousness, hidden from us by the filter of galactic and planetary evolution, cannot be recognized by us for what it is until our consciousness becomes capable of recognizing it.
          Precisely as three of the greatest sages of the last century—Bede Griffiths, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin—have suggested, spirit may have always been immanent in this dimension of experience, leading us to the ultimate revelation that we, both in our spiritual and physical substance, are of the essence of divinity: everything we can see, perceive and reflect on, is of that essence.
          I was attracted to Teilhard’s writings from their first publication and they have taught me to draw things together that seemed at first incomprehensible. Teilhard seems to be the theologian that the Church is in great need of. His understanding of the process of evolution, showing the movement of a rising tide of consciousness embedded in the life processes of the earth, is one of the most enthralling ideas of our time. But, he asks, will this universal Spirit of Evolution “flower in time to ensure that, arrived at the point of super-humanity, we avoid dehumanising ourselves?” (19) That is the troubling question that confronts us at this time.
          I remember also how thrilled I was to find this passage in Bede Griffiths’ book, Return to the Centre:

The evolution of matter from the beginning leads to the evolution of consciousness in man; it is the universe itself which becomes conscious in man…It is the inner movement of the Spirit, immanent in nature, which brings about the evolution of matter and life into consciousness and the same Spirit at work in human consciousness, latent in every man, is always at work leading to divine life.(20)

          His words, like Aurobindo's in his extraordinary book, The Life Divine, and Teilhard de Chardin’s in his vision of humanity moving towards the a further evolutionary development and a higher spirituality in what he called the Omega Point, helped me to see that the evolution of life on this planet is like a plant, an organic growth, which has its roots in an unknown depth. Its flowering is a potential within us, something that we have still to experience, that only a few pioneers of consciousness have experienced. Again, it is something which is unfolding and evolving from within, as the potential form of an oak is contained within an acorn. We cannot know the final form until we have grown into it but we can begin to understand the process of evolution which has formed us and begin consciously to relate to it.
          Our consciousness is now poised at the threshold of the encounter with cosmic consciousness. The invisible field that relates us to galactic life resonates with the call to relationship with it and many people are responding to this call. There is a new perception of life pouring into the culture through many thousands of individuals: the perception of the universe as an organic, sacred and living whole with ourselves as conscious participants in that living whole. We seem to be reaching the point where we can experience cosmic consciousness, cosmic mind or cosmic soul (I use these terms interchangeably) as the greater field or ground from which our consciousness derives and in which it participates. Could this new (yet very ancient) idea transform our relationships with each other and with the earth?

Cosmic Consciousness
          In his book, Cosmic Consciousness, published some hundred years ago, Richard Bucke described an experience that changed his life and his understanding. Because this passage means so much to me and I would like to share it with readers who may not know of it, I am including it in this chapter.

I had spent the evening (in 1872 in England) in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost. (21)

          I would like to end this difficult chapter with a passage from Christopher Bache’s book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, published in 2003, a hundred and thirty-five years after Richard Bucke’s experience:

Though these experiences were extraordinary in their own right, the most poignant aspect of [them] was not the discovered dimensions of the universe themselves but what my seeing and understanding them meant to the Consciousness I was with. It seemed so pleased to have someone to show Its work to. I felt that it had been waiting for billions of years for embodied consciousness to evolve to the point where we could at long last begin to see, understand and appreciate what had been accomplished. I felt the loneliness of this Intelligence having created such a masterpiece and having no one to appreciate Its work, and I wept. I wept for its isolation and in awe of the profound love which had accepted this isolation as part of a larger plan. Behind creation lies a Love of extraordinary proportions, and all of existence is an expression of this love. The intelligence of the universe's design is equally matched by the depth of love that inspired it. (22)

          It may be that Cosmic Consciousness has waited aeons for us to reach the point where more than a handful of individuals could awaken to this experience. To respond to what is happening at the deepest level, to take a new step in our evolutionary journey, we have to leave the precinct of the rational mind and create the vessels to hold the new wine that is pouring into our culture from many different sources.

        Notes:

1. Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Copernicus's theory was banned by the Catholic Church in 1616 because it was said to be pseudoscientific. It was taken off the index in 1820 when the Church accepted that it was proven. It was then deemed to be scientific.
2. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story,
3. Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness – Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, p. 9-10
4. Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Alfred van der Marck Editions, New York, 1986, p. 17
5. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
6. Susanne Schaup, Sophia, Aspects of the Divine Feminine, Nicolas-Hays Inc. Maine, 1997, p. xi
7. Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man , p. 272
8. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1988
9. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chapter Xl, p. 300 (1963 Collins & Routledge edition)
10. Rabbi David Cooper, God is a Verb, Riverhead Books, New York, 1997, p. 1
11. Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Flamingo (HarperCollins), London, 2002, p. 37
12. Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah - The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, p. 24, Harper Collins, New York, 1995
13. Periphyseon, (page 197 see pamplet, The Ground of Being, by Joseph Milne) (p. 196) translated by I.P. Sheldon-Williams, revised by John O’Meara, Montreal, 1987
14. Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Alfred van der Marck Editions, New York, 1986
15. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Lotus Light Publications, Wilmot, WI, 1990
16. Ravi Ravindra, Science and the Sacred, Quest Books, Wheaton, Ohio, 2003, p. 115-116
17. estimates of the number of cells vary and are continually revised as we learn more.
18. The Bhagavad Gita
19. Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, p.141
20. Bede Griffiths, Return to the Center, Collins, St. James's Place, London, 1976 and Templegate, Springfield, Ill. 1977, p. 31-32
21. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness E.P. Dutton & Co., 1923
22. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, p. 74

The 15th century photograph of the Head of God from the Museum of Winchester Cathedral is by Dr. John Crook FSA www.john-crook.com

  ------ ------

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Science and a Conscious Universe

put in Bohm p. xiii

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dreams: Messages from the Soul

Henri Rousseau - La Rêve

Dream Flowers
In last night's dream who put into my hand
Two sprigs of verbena, culled from what sweet tree?
Your mother, it was told me, though I could not see her:
But to what daughter and by what mother,
By what Demeter to what Persephone given?
Was the hand mine that took those flowers
Given from one world to another?

There is a speech by none in this life spoken,
Yet we the speakers, we the listeners seem;
In that discourse, all signifies:
But what mind means the meaning that then is known?

Flowers of the earth grow out of mystery
From the deep loam of what has been
The past rises up in their life-stream
On whose surface images form and re-form;
But dreams rise up from a deeper spring:
Not from the past nor from the future come, but from the origin
These semblances of knowledge veiled in being.

                                                            — from The Hollow Hill, by Kathleen Raine


Dreams connect this time-bound world with an eternal one. Like the thread of Ariadne, they are a tenuous but vital link with the source of our being, one of the very few guides we have through the labyrinth of life. Without this thread connecting us to the fathomless source of ourselves, it is difficult to find the way towards gaining the cooperation and guidance of the instinct, as well as to recognize and transform its immensely powerful and dangerous aspect that is symbolized in mythology by the Minotaur, the Gorgon and the Dragon. Only through a growing relationship with the soul can the destructive powers of the instinct be contained and transformed so that we are no longer condemned, like Sisyphus, to sacrifice our lives to the fruitless labour of endlessly repeating the negative patterns of the past.           
          The interpretation of dreams as a way of healing both soul and body and of deepening our understanding of life is one of the great rediscoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “The dream,” Jung wrote,“is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” (1)
          Yet, despite more than a hundred years of dream analysis since Freud wrote his Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no general awareness in our culture that dreams are of any value or significance. Children are not brought up to be aware of their dreams, to share them with parents, teachers or friends, or to find wonder and interest in their meaning. Politicians are not taught how to recognize and pay attention to dreams that might warn them of the inadvisability of taking nations into war. Dreams are something that just happen: nice dreams and nasty dreams come and go rather like the weather but, unlike the weather, we don't comment on them to each other. As soon as the night is over, they are forgotten and we pass on to the more important concerns of daily life without making any attempt to remember them or to understand their meaning. Are we neglecting a vital aspect of our lives?
          Heinrich Zimmer tells a magical story in his book, The King and the Corpse:

          It was remarkable, the way the king became involved in the adventure. For ten years, every day, there had been appearing in his audience chamber, where he sat in state hearing petitions and dispensing justice, a holy man in the robe of a beggar ascetic, who, without a word, would offer him a fruit. And the royal personage would accept the trifling present, passing it along without an afterthought to his treasurer standing behind the throne. Without making any request, the mendicant would then withdraw and vanish into a crowd of petitioners, having betrayed no sign either of disappointment or of impatience.
          Then it happened one day, some ten years after the first appearance of the holy man, that a tame monkey, having escaped from the women's apartments in the inner palace, came bounding into the hall and leaped upon the arm of the throne. The mendicant had just presented his gift, and the king playfully handed it over to the monkey. When the animal bit into it, a valuable jewel dropped out and rolled across the floor.
          The king's eyes grew wide. He turned with dignity to the treasurer at his shoulder. “What has become of all the others?” he asked. But the treasurer was unable to say. He had been tossing the unimpressive gifts through an upper, trellised window into the treasure house, not even bothering to unlock the door. And so he excused himself and hurried to the vault. Opening it, he made his way to the part beneath the little window. There, on the floor, lay a mass of rotten fruit in various stages of decay, and, amidst this debris of many years, a heap of priceless gems. The beggar, it later transpired, bore the appropriate name of “Rich in Patience.” (2)

          Could this image of the beggar - “Rich in Patience” - apply to the soul who, night after night, sends us the jewels of our dreams, only to have them tossed through the window of our lives onto the rubbish heap to which we consign them, never discovering their meaning or asking the sender's identity?
          In his autobiography, Jung comments on the importance of dreams for keeping us in touch with our soul:

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional "unconscious identity" with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications…This enormous loss is compensated for by the symbols of our dreams. They bring up our original nature - its instincts and peculiar thinking. Unfortunately they express their contents in the language of nature, which is strange and incomprehensible to us. It therefore confronts us with the task of translating it into the rational words and concepts of modern speech, which has liberated itself…from its mystical participation with the things it describes. (3)

          The very earliest recorded dream comes from Sumeria, from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh had two vivid dreams of a meteor falling to earth and of a great axe. He took these dreams to his mother to be interpreted and learnt from her that the gods were to give him a mighty companion whom he would take to his heart. From approximately the same period - ca. 2000 BC - a cylinder seal records the dream of King Gudea of Lagash who was addressed by the god Ningirsu, telling him to build a temple in his honor. Unable to interpret the dream, he took it to the temple of the goddess-mother Gatumdag and asked her for help. The goddess gave the king her interpretation of the dream in dialogue with him. So we know from these two examples that dreams were taken seriously in Sumerian culture and that interpretations of them were expected and received. (4)
          In the Egyptian, Sumero-Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek and Roman civilizations, as well as in all shamanc cultures, dreams were used both for divination and healing. In the Old Testament we know of the dreams of Pharaoh that were interpreted by Joseph (Gen.41) and the dream of king Nebuchadnezzar interpreted by Daniel (Daniel 2). Daniel, under the threat of death, had not only to interpret the King's dream but even to tell him what it was, since the king himself had forgotten it! Jacob's dream of the ladder set up between earth and heaven with the angels ascending and descending is a striking image of the pathway of communication between earth and heaven, between the human soul and the eternal realm of spirit (Gen.28). The stone on which he rested his head had, from the most ancient times, been a symbol of divinity, and Jacob said of the place where he had slept and dreamed: “This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen.28:17) How much lost knowledge is contained in this one sentence.
          Moving on to Hellenistic times, in the second century AD, a Greek man called Artemidorus, living in the city of Ephesus, recorded his observation of three thousand dreams in five books. Arranging them in general categories, he noted that it was important to have knowledge of the dreamer when interpreting his dreams and to set the interpretation in the context of his life, his outlook, his emotions and his desires.

A Sacred Space for Dreaming and Healing
          Dreams as communications from a transcendent dimension and as agents of healing, divination and prophecy were received in places specially built for this purpose. The origins of the “sacred place” set aside for these purposes may go back to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras when the shape of the cave and, later, the Megalithic temple-tomb, followed the contours of the life-generating womb of the goddess.
          In the time of the Greek philosopher Parmenides (sixth century BC), there was, as in many other parts of the ancient world, a shamanic tradition involving the practise of incubation in caves. Here, often over a period of several days, the initiate would await dreams or make a shamanic journey to the inner dimensions in order to receive guidance which he would then bring back to this world. Parmenides himself wrote a famous poem about a journey that took him “as far as longing can reach.” His chariot, as he describes it, drawn by mares and guided by young women, took him through gigantic gates that stretched between earth and heaven and onto the road that led into the great chasm of the underworld to an encounter with the goddess Persephone who, as he says, “welcomed me kindly and took my right hand in hers,” giving him a message that he was instructed to take back to the world of mortals. (5)
          At Dodona, in the north of Greece, and above all at Delphi, the celebrated priestesses of the Oracle received embassies from all over the Greek empire, The high priestess or Pythia at Delphi who also held the title of “The Delphic Bee” was the highest authority in that world, intermediary between the supplicant and the god Apollo. Here also, the serpent was associated with the shrine of divination and prophecy and, as in the Aesclepian sanctuaries, snakes were kept in the sacred precincts.

woman or priestess experiencing rite of incubation? from the Hypogeum in Malta

          At the Hypogeum in Malta, remarkable sanctuaries were hollowed out in three descending layers deep under the earth, which suggests that they were used for the purpose of incubation. The tiny statue of a sleeping woman found in one of them may show a woman or a priestess in shamanic trance, or receiving a special dream.
          In Greece, people traveled great distances to the many healing sanctuaries of the god Aesclepius - the most famous of which were at Epidaurus, Kos and Pergamum (modern Turkey) - to be healed of their diseases. Here, as in Egypt and Crete, the main diagnostic agent was the dream, sometimes a visionary dream of the god himself. As one man who was healed of his long-standing illness described it, in words that leap up from a forgotten past, “One listened and heard things, sometimes in a dream, sometimes in waking life. One’s hair stood on end; one cried and felt happy; one’s heart swelled out but not with vainglory. What human being could put this experience into words? But anyone who has been through it will share my knowledge and recognize the state of my mind.” (6)
          The serpent is always shown in association with Aesclepius, suggesting the long-established relationship between divine powers, the image of the serpent and the regeneration of life. After the appropriate cleansing rituals had been performed and sacrifices and invocations to the god had been made, the patient was wrapped in a special robe and conducted to an underground chamber, passageway or cave where he waited, sometimes for days, for the healing dream. Sometimes the power of the dream itself brought the desired cure, sometimes it was interpreted by priests trained in the art of divining its meaning. Body and soul were treated as one unit. Sickness of the body—as well as sickness of the mind—reflected a state of imbalance between the patient and the gods, the nature of which the dream would reveal. The ruins of Pergamum today give only the faintest hint of the immense and thriving city that once stood there. The Aesclepian healing sanctuary was five miles from the hill-top citadel, yet still within the city limits. Amazingly, the springs of water that flowed there so long ago flow there still today. I dipped my hands into them when I was there.
          The Platonic academy in Athens, founded in the fifth century BC, lasted for a thousand years, and it was perhaps here that the study of dreams was most completely developed and disseminated over the Greek and later the Roman empire. It was thought that sleep, in separating the soul from the life of the senses, enabled the dreamer to awake to the inner life and open his inner “eye”. It is a tragedy that this idea was not transmitted to Christian civilization and that dreams were neglected for some fifteen hundred years and with them, the living connection that people had not only with their own soul but with the soul of the natural world.

Spirits into Demons
          With the rise and spread of Christianity, we leave the open, enquiring and generally tolerant mind of the Greek world and discover a very different climate of belief. We increasingly encounter an attitude toward the soul that sees it as a battleground between the powers of darkness and light, between the demonic hosts of Satan on the one hand, and the angelic hosts of heaven on the other. The realm of air just above the earth was imagined as Satan's territory, and from here he ruled over the earth and humanity. The “spirits” of air, sea and earth, the daemons so familiar to the Greeks and Romans and to older shamanic cultures, were transformed into demons. The Church Fathers believed that demons – led by Satan - were responsible for the malefic forces of nature - storm, flood and hail - and for the diseases which afflicted men and women. With psychological hindsight as well as historical knowledge, we know that the loss of the archaic sense of oneness with nature and with the spirits inhabiting nature led to the transformation of these spirits into the “demons” that terrified people. Priests were called to “exorcize” these demons rather than to heal the underlying cause of mental or physical distress.
          In the early centuries of Christianity, stories about the furious battles of the Desert Fathers with the Devil or the Evil One found their way into collective beliefs and increased people’s fear of Satan. The greater the effort to exorcize the demons and to resist the wiles and temptations of Satan, the greater became the oppressive and repressive character of Christianity until this process culminated in the dreadful practices of the Inquisition and the witch-hunts of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries when many men as well as hundreds of thousands of women were condemned to die agonizing deaths at the stake.

The Later Interpretation of Dreams
          However, the belief in the importance of dreams did not evaporate overnight. For a thousand years dreams still were interpreted in many different ways by the three primary cultures - Christian, Muslim and Hebrew - which met on European soil. As late as the Renaissance - particularly under the influence of the Platonic revival in fifteenth century Florence inspired by Marsilio Ficino - dreams were again taken seriously as communicating divine guidance and prophecy. It is said that Ficino put on his finest robes in preparation for entering into a dialogue with the World-Soul, the anima-mundi.
          As a last brilliant image of the dream at the threshold of the Renaissance in fifteenth century France, there is the exquisite scene painted by King René of Anjou at the beginning of his book, Le Livre du Cueur d’Amours Espris, as described by Professor Unterkircher, who wrote the commentary on this rare illustrated text. It describes the journey of the King’s heart and its encounter with the helpful and hindering creatures that it meets on its way to its spiritual destination. This precious book is now one of the treasures of the National Library in Vienna:

René, the King and Poet, is asleep. In the magical night scene he sees himself and the figures in his dream: Amour, the God of Love, is standing beside his bed and with both hands plucks the heart from René’s breast, giving it to the Page, Ardent Desire, who stands with hands outstretched to receive it. It is not René himself who starts off on a journey with the Page but his heart, personified as the Knight Cueur. The artist brings this multileveled poetic allegory to life by giving its characters a three-dimensional reality and endowing the scenes with color shadings and light that almost transcend reality, suggesting that realm between dream and daylight wherein poetry has its roots…The painting’s physical details are as easy to describe as it is difficult or impossible to do justice in words to its rich, dreamy atmosphere and masterful color harmonies. (7)

King René's Dream

          But from this time until the nineteenth century, with the growing emphasis on the scientific as opposed to the sacramental view of life, the split widens between men and women and their dreaming soul. The numinous quality once associated with dreams fades into the scepticism that has become the main characteristic of modern secular culture.
          Now, faced with the abyss of nihilism that life without a transcendent meaning presents to us, people are beginning once more to pay attention to their dreams, responding to the exploration of the psyche led by the two great pioneers of dream interpretation, Freud and Jung. Their discoveries did not spring suddenly into being but developed out of soil that had been cultivated during the nineteenth century by outstandingly gifted men. The Romantic movement in Germany was interested in dreams. In the early part of that century in Germany, von Schubert published The Symbolism of Dreams, in which he described the pictorial language of dreams as a “higher kind of algebra.” In 1867 in France, Hervey de Saint-Denis (1823-1892) published his Dreams and the Means to Direct Them.
          Henri Ellenberger, in his monumental work, The Discovery of the Unconscious, writes that “The scarcity of this book is the more regrettable because it contains the findings of a lifetime of dream investigation by a man who opened new paths that few men were able to follow.”(8) Saint-Denis began drawing his dreams as a child and, incredibly, for twenty years never missed a single one, assembling twenty-two notebooks recording the dreams of nineteen hundred and forty-six nights over this period. His emphasis was on the possibility of controlling the dream process from the conscious mind and not, as Jung’s approach would be, on the idea that the dream process revealed the existence of a consciousness superior to that of the waking mind.
          Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 and brought together two streams of nineteenth century exploration: the study of dreams and the pathology of mental illness. Jung's obituary of Freud includes this tribute to him: “Freud rescued something of the utmost value from the past, where it had seemingly sunk in oblivion... It was an act of the greatest scientific courage to make anything as unpopular as dreams a subject of serious discussion.” (9)

Dreams as Messages from the Primordial Soul
          Jung began to understand the unconscious, not as Freud did, as the repository of repressed infantile drives and wishes, but as a vitally creative “energy” whose image-creating faculty was a primary element of human consciousness, connecting it with the deeper dimension of the collective unconscious. He observed that in Africa and in the American Indian tribes, for example, men and women interpreted their “big” dreams and visions as messages from the ancestors which were used as guidance for the tribe as a whole, generation after generation. Such dreams, Jung believed, reflected a superior intelligence and wisdom that represents a directing energy or consciousness within our psychic depths—depths that are the repository of the immemorial ancestral experience of life. He saw the dream as a symbol in itself, a symbol which expressed an idea or constellation of ideas that could not be expressed directly in words but, rather, in images. Dreams, he realized, were one of the few ways that the primordial instinctive soul could communicate with the conscious mind: “Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”(10)
          To be able to interpret dreams, one has to have a wide knowledge of what symbolic images have meant to humanity as a whole, as well as to specific cultures, and to be able to understand what they meant to shamanic cultures which were far more in touch with their soul than we are. In his last book, Man and His Symbols, Jung commented:

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation…It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from the unconscious mind every night, deciphering these communications seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with it. Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, and it is often directly mistrusted and despised. “It’s only psychological” too often means: It is nothing. (11)

          The dream never expresses its meaning in the logical sequence of left brain thinking that the well-trained rational mind can grasp without effort. On the contrary, it speaks in the language of parable, metaphor and paradox, more closely related to right-hemispheric consciousness. The apparent lack of clarity in most dreams comes from the fact that they are presented in an unfamiliar language of images that has to be learnt, just as one has to learn the language of hieroglyphs before one can interpret the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Jung’s words amplify this necessity:

Dreams contain images and thought associations which we do not create with conscious intent. They arise spontaneously without our assistance and are representatives of a psychic activity withdrawn from our arbitrary will. Therefore the dream is, properly speaking, a highly objective, natural product of the psyche, from which we might expect indications, or at least hints, about certain basic trends in the psychic process. Now, since the psychic process, like any other life process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation, we might expect dreams to give us certain indicia about the objective causality as well as about the objective tendencies, precisely because dreams are nothing less than self-portraits of the psychic life-process. (12)

          Again, he observes that “The dream comes in as the expression of an involuntary, unconscious psychic process beyond the control of the conscious mind. It shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is…That is to say, I take dreams as diagnostically valuable facts.” (13)
           The dream has a compensatory function in relation to the attitude of the conscious mind. It reflects the “overall” view of a deeper intelligence which can see both sides of the picture, both aspects of the psyche—that which is known to the dreamer and that which is unknown. If a conscious attitude is too rigid and limited, too inflated or too self-critical; if the individual carries a deep unconscious trauma which is asking for recognition and healing; if there is a danger of imbalance leading to mental or physical illness, or if the dreamer is in danger of going “off the rails,” the dream points the way to the integration of the deeper knowledge and insight of the unconscious mind with the conscious one and, therefore, to a better state of balance: “The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this case we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behaviour. Too little on one side results in too much on the other…When we set out to interpret a dream, it is always helpful to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?” (14)
           The dream of a woman concerned about her relationship with her daughter reflects the need for greater consciousness: “I am lying in bed asleep on Easter Day. My daughter brings me an Easter egg but I burrow under the covers and refuse to look.”
          This dream shows the dreamer lying asleep (unconscious) on the most significant day of the year—the day when life is regenerated from death. Her daughter represents both her daughter in real life and also the young, growing aspect of herself - her new life - carrying in its hands the symbol of this new life, still in embryonic form. She rejects both child and offering, choosing to remain unconscious and hide under the bed covers like an ostrich. The dream showed her what she was doing and invited a revaluation of her relationship with her own emerging creative life, symbolized by her daughter, and also a transformation of her relationship with her daughter in real life. The dream helped her to recognize that she was, in fact, unconsciously rejecting both, a very painful realization.
          Jung saw this compensatory process as a natural, self-regulating one, which could take place during sleep and not necessarily disturb the dreamer. But he was convinced that when dreams woke the dreamer up, it was because the unconscious mind wanted to bring certain things to the attention of the conscious mind, to stimulate it to reflect on their meaning:

Dreams preserve sleep whenever possible: that is to say, they function necessarily and automatically under the influence of the sleeping state; but they break through when their function demands it, that is, when the compensatory contents are so intense that they are liable to counteract sleep. A compensatory content is especially intense when it has a vital significance for conscious orientation. (15)

          The “big” dream and the nightmare are two examples of intense contents which are significant for conscious orientation, but the more one reflects on “small” dreams, the more they reveal their meaning; so that, although one may be very far from understanding the meaning of every dream, one becomes progressively more familiar with one's own dream symbolism and, therefore, more able to respond to it. One begins to recognize the soul or the body's signals of harmony or distress, continually deepening the sense of relationship between the two aspects of the psyche, the older, wiser aspect and the younger, inexperienced aspect (the ego personality) which is trying to make sense of life. As Jung observed, “Through the assimilation of unconscious contents, the momentary life of consciousness can once more be brought into harmony with the law of nature from which it all too easily departs and the individual can be led back to the natural law of his own being.”(16)
          This alienation from our own authentic being begins with the expectations we place upon our children. Our culture imposes such ferocious extraverted demands on children and young people, demands such as passing exams, learning to use the new digital technology and gaining the qualifications needed to reach “the top of the ladder” in a particular profession, that soul needs may be neglected. This is particularly the case where the channels for the expression of emotions and the skills which can mediate and develop feeling – music, art, poetry and drama – do not exist. Children as young as two now have televisions in their bedrooms and are encouraged to learn how to use a computer. Many, even at this age, watch hours of television. There is no place for the imagination in their lives or for the creation of a relationship with the world that surrounds them. There is no space simply to be. Instead, children watch pre-programmed entertainment, or spend hours with their Play- Stations and Game-Boys.
          Programmed in this and other ways—perhaps through religious or even secular indoctrination—some individuals may later develop a rigid controlling attitude in relation to their lives and their needs, and may be convinced of the infallibility or absolute truth of their convictions or beliefs. Their once healthy instincts may have been so repressed and distorted that they eventually control the conscious mind. One can see this tendency in fundamentalism of all kinds, whether secular or religious. Fundamentalism in its most extreme form merges into fanaticism, reflected in the behavior of the Taliban and in the beliefs of certain fundamentalist Christian sects in America. Fundamentalists cannot risk the intrusion of any doubt. However, when the doubt is “deleted” or repressed into the unconscious, it adds to the strident, messianic tone of the conscious position. The tone of absolute conviction reflects the fact that the unconscious is controlling the conscious personality. This is the psychology of the bully who must, at all cost, control whatever situation she finds herself in, whether at home or in the wider field of society. The need for control arises from the need to deny what has been split off or repressed.
          At the other end of the scale are people who may be so uncertain of themselves and their own needs that they are easily manipulated or influenced by others because they have no sense of their own or other's boundaries. They may have difficulty establishing themselves in life, where they all too readily become the victim in a relationship or are easily persuaded to follow an ideology, forceful personality or charismatic leader. The first attitude reflects a “superman” attitude towards life, where the goal is to control, dominate and manipulate events through one’s will. The second attitude may lead to a surrender to what one perceives as life's overwhelmingly hostile power and the conviction that adverse circumstances can never be changed. If accompanied by strict religious beliefs, everything is accepted as the “will of God,” or the “will of Allah”. Absolute obedience to a powerful leader will be the corollary of this psychic attitude. Both perspectives reflect an attitude that is too rigid and limited to include the full potential of understanding and insight that could be available to the conscious personality if unconscious needs and drives were integrated with it.
          The work of Freud, Jung and thousands of others who have studied dreams in order to understand the language of the soul has barely reached the consciousness of the general public, yet the current interest in New Age approaches to self-healing suggests that there may be millions of people who are looking for a deeper understanding of themselves and of life. In the intermediate stage between total indifference to dreams and the realization that dreams may be conveying something important from the deeper strata of the soul, they may be treated as something that can be exploited by the conscious mind “for greater power and influence”. This attitude gives rise to unqualified charlatans who set themselves up as dream interpreters or therapists. It treats the unconscious as a useful repository of power which can be harnessed to the achievement of specific superficial goals such as the creation of wealth, but it contributes nothing to reuniting the dissociated aspects of our being. If anything it makes the unconscious the servant of the deficient aims of the conscious ego and does great injury to the soul, trivializing the priceless treasure of a deeper understanding of life, like the king who nearly lost the treasure offered to him by the beggar at his court.
          The word psychology means “The word or speech of the soul.” Time devoted to paying attention to our dreams helps us to deepen our understanding of the speech of the soul. To become truly aware of our dream life and to create a relationship with the unconscious - the instinctive part of ourselves of which we are not aware - we have to treat the dream with an attitude of profound respect. There has been enough evidence gathered during this last century alone to know with certainty that the Dreamer, who night after night conveys the messages to our sleeping self, is far more important than we realize, as the Jungian analyst, Alan MacGlashan, relates in his book, The Savage and Beautiful Country:

          The concept of the Dreamer is among the most fascinating and relevant of the mysteries facing contemporary man. It is nothing less than an invitation to transcend our normal and habitual level of consciousness, to develop a long-latent function, to enter a terra incognita of which, paradoxically, we are free-born citizens. As Dante was led through realms beyond human range by the ghost of Virgil, so the Dreamer can lead us, through the labyrinthine corridors of sleep to a realm of being where the human mind blooms in new and brilliant and unimagined forms of life…
          The Dreamer is the source not only of dreams but of symbol, myth and fairy tale; he is the ruler of a twilight kingdom which lies between the temporal and the Timeless, or in theological terms, between man and God. The Dreamer is he who tells us golden stories, coming from afar, that are the only true salve and comfort of our existential condition; and who brings us in the night, as his final gift, intimations of the possibility of other forms of awareness - co-existent with our conscious life...which perhaps need only a fractional turning of the head to be seen and known. (17)

The Traumatized Instinct
          Paradoxically - and this is most important - where the instinct has been deeply traumatized, it can also present itself as something or someone that is deeply threatening to the dreamer, even something demonic in its apparent intent to destroy. No one has illustrated this better than Donald Kalsched in his book, The Inner World of Trauma. As he explains, “the traumatized psyche is self-traumatizing. Trauma doesn’t end with the cessation of outer violation, but continues unabated in the inner world of the trauma victim, whose dreams are often haunted by persecutory inner figures.” The second finding is that “the victim of personalized trauma continually finds himself or herself in life situations where he or she is re-traumatized.”(18)

For the person who has experienced unbearable pain, the psychological defense of dissociation allows external life to go on but at a great internal cost. The outer trauma ends and its effects may be largely “forgotten,” but the psychological sequelae of the trauma continue to haunt the inner world, and they do this, Jung discovered, in the form of certain images which cluster around a strong affect…These complexes tend to behave autonomously as frightening inner “beings,” who are represented in dreams as attacking “enemies,” vicious animals, etc. (19)

          I think the insight into the fact that the victim of trauma repeats the pattern of traumatization could be applied to the life of humanity as a whole. A powerful example of this can be seen in how we continually re-enact and suffer the trauma of war. The memories of conflict and the suffering engendered through past conflicts do not go away with the coming of new generations. They are held in the unconscious of the species, ready to be re-activated when specific “triggers” call forth the same response. If we can gain some insight into what psychological factors cause us to be caught up in this pattern of unconscious repetition, we might be able to transform it. Without insight, we seem destined to continue as before.

The Effects of the Trauma of War
          Whatever the causes of why we are addicted to war - whether it is the influence on us of the archetypal pattern of the warrior or the ongoing inner conflict in our soul between the conscious mind and the primordial instinct - we need to understand its effects better than we do. There are not many books on the effects of war on the soul. One of the most interesting has been written by the Jungian analyst, Edward Tick, who has devoted his life to treating traumatized veterans of war, the Vietnam War in particular. In his book, War and the Soul, he writes that veterans can be haunted for years by reliving in nightmares the original terrifying experiences they underwent. “They may see themselves killing again, or friends and enemies dying again. They may have waking visions of dead friends, enemies, or both. They may also, in retrospect, feel moral anguish that the people they killed did not deserve to die.” (20)

Though hostilities cease and life moves on, and though loved ones yearn for their healing, veterans often remain drenched in the imagery and emotion of war for decades and sometimes for their entire lives. For these survivors, every vital human characteristic that we attribute to the soul may be fundamentally reshaped. These traits include how we perceive; how our minds are organized and function; how we love and relate; what we believe, expect, and value; what we feel and refuse to feel; and what we judge as good or evil, right or wrong. Thought the affliction that today we call post-traumatic stress disorder has had many names over the centuries, it is always the result of the way war invades, wounds ands transforms our spirit. (21)

           As he explores the effects of war on the soul and the reasons he explains why post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is so difficult to treat. He writes, “…the traumatic impact of war and violence inflicts wounds so deep we need to address them with extraordinary attention, resources and methods. Conventional methods of medical and psychological functioning and therapeutics are not adequate to explain or treat such wounds. Veterans and their afflictions try to tell us so.” (22)

War devastates not only our physical being but our very soul—for the entire culture as well as for the individual. In war, chaos overwhelms compassion, violence replaces cooperation, instinct replaces rationality, gut dominates mind. When drenched in these conditions, the soul is disfigured and can become lost for life. What is called soul loss is an extreme psychospiritual condition beyond what psychologists commonly call dissociation. It is far more than psychic numbing or separation of mind from body. It is a removal of the center of experience from the living body without completely snapping the connection. In the presence of overwhelming life-threatening violence, the soul—the true self—flees. The center of experience shifts; the body takes the impact of the trauma but does not register it as deeply as before. With body and soul separated, a person is trapped in a limbo where past and present intermingle without differentiation or continuity. Nothing feels right until body and soul rejoin. (23)

           It is worth reading his book to discover not only how he defines soul but the efficacy of the methods he uses to reconnect soul and body.

Changing Our Lives
          Dreams can tell us what has happened and what is happening to the instinct. Since we have so little awareness of this dimension of ourselves and even less knowledge of how to connect with it, we are deprived of the means of responding to it. With greater understanding of them, dreams can immeasurably enrich our lives, drawing us closer to the meaning of our suffering if, for example, we have experienced the loss of soul described above through the trauma of war or the trauma of a personal catastrophe in our lives such as the loss of a parent, a child, or the disintegration of a relationship.
          As an example of how paying attention to dreams can change the course of one’s life, the late English poet laureate, Ted Hughes, tells of a dream that he had when he was at university. He had been working on an essay until late into the night. Exhausted, he fell asleep. He dreamed that he was sitting once again at his desk. Suddenly, the door of his study opened and a man with the head of a fox came in. The fox-man looked as if he had been in a fire and his skin was blackened and bleeding. He came to the table and put a blood-stained paw on the white page of Hughes' essay, saying, “This is killing both of us.” Deeply shaken by this dream, Ted Hughes decided the next day to switch studies from English literature to anthropology. The effort to subject the literature and poetry that he loved to deconstructive criticism had been killing his instinct and even threatening his life.
          Learning to understand the symbolic language of the soul and to apply the insight gained to the problems of our relationships with other people and our relationship with life, can gradually transform us. We can learn to live life in a different way, less blindly, no longer at the mercy of unconscious complexes, no longer reacting blindly to events; more sensitively aware of the direction in which life is seeking to take us. We are aware of our smallness in relation to life’s greatness, but we are also aware that life may depend for the fulfilment of its purpose upon this frail vessel of our consciousness which it has brought into being over so many millions of years.
          To face the darkness of the soul and to learn how to relate to it is an act of heroism in an age which denies the existence of the soul and has come to disparage and reject whatever does not appear to be “rational”. Not surprisingly, in view of its neglect of the soul, our culture is now confronted by an eruption of the “irrational” in the form of the hatred, anger and violence of terrorism, violent crime and self-destructive patterns of behavior such as drug-addiction and alcoholism. And it is trying to eradicate the threat by exerting ever more control instead of looking at the causes which have given rise to these symptoms of distress. It may be difficult to comprehend the hypothesis that the terrorism and the crime we fight with weapons, armies and prisons, thinking to control and eliminate them, may be a manifestation of our own shadow, our own traumatized and split off instincts. Because, at the deepest level, we are all connected with each other, these instincts manifest in the world as an enemy intent on destroying us.

The Dream as Prophecy
          Sometimes a visionary dream can be dreamt on behalf of a tribal group, even perhaps the whole of humanity. Yet who today except someone familiar with the Jungian approach to dreams, would pay attention to such a dream or recognize that it carried a message for our time? In contrast to this, the dreams of the people of indigenous cultures were always taken seriously and paid close attention for this reason. The famous dream of a nine year old boy belonging to the Sioux tribe in America is well known and worth recalling here. As an old man he recounted it to a Nebraskan poet called John Neihardt who recorded it in his book Black Elk Speaks. He had seen himself standing on the central mountain of the world which he recognized as his own sacred peak in his homeland, even though he knew that “anywhere is the center of the world.” “I was seeing” he said, “the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together, like one being. And I saw the the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.” (24)

The Dream as Emissary
          The dream plays the role of the god Thoth in Egypt, or the Greek god Hermes, acting as emissary between the deeper dimension of the instinctive soul and the conscious personality. In the more familiar imagery of Christianity and also the less familiar imagery of Kabbalah, the Dreamer may be compared to an angelic messenger, bringing guidance, warning and the possibility of healing.
          Dreams may come dressed in the humble garb of everyday life, using as symbolic images people and things that we see, hear, touch and meet in the course of our lives, yet their role may be compared to that of the four great archangels of the Christian tradition, who are the messengers or emissaries of the unseen dimension of spirit.
          In the famous story of Tobias and the Angel in the Apocrypha, Raphael did not reveal himself to Tobias and his father until Tobias, realizing how much his new found friend had accomplished, said to his father, “Oh Father, it is no harm to me to give him half of those things which I have brought: for he hath brought me again to thee in safety, and made whole my wife, and brought me the money, and likewise healed thee.” (Tobit 12:2-4)
          How much we may miss by our neglect of the messenger or our failure to recognize its message is conveyed in the tremendous revelation which follows: “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels, which present the prayers of the saints, and which go in and out before the glory of the Holy One.” (Tobit 12:15)

Filippino Lippi Tobias and the Angel

 Dreams may come as emissaries of the infinitely older and wiser consciousness in the depths of our  soul. In the imagery of the four great archangels of ancient tradition, they can bring us, as Gabriel  brought to Mary, the annunciation of a divine birth within the soul, the illuminating awareness of a  different order of reality. Like Michael, who traditionally wields the sword of discrimination, dreams  may offer the judgment of the spirit upon the way we live our lives, upon the deficiency of our  conscious values and our rejection of anything which cannot be “proven” by the rational mind or  perceived by the senses. Like Raphael, they may bring us healing for the buried wounds our soul carries; like Uriel they may bring understanding and insight.
          All these are vital aspects of the role dreams can play in expanding our knowledge of and  relationship with the soul. But these messages come to us in a form that may be hard to recognize  unless we are familiar with the language of symbols. Instead of thundering with the voice of an  archangel, they may in a subtle, even humorous way point out the fact that we need to change our standpoint by buying some new shoes.
          Perseverance in the effort to understand the symbolic imagery of dreams brings its reward in  the establishment of an attitude of nightly listening to the messages which come as visitors from that  other dimension of reality. The gradual growth of understanding is occasionally marked by the “Big Dream”—a moment of revelation which can give direction and meaning to one's life and is altogether outside one's normal frame of reference, even having a reference for the culture as a whole, as in the dream of Black Elk above. So one would be wise to remember the words written in the Babylonian Talmud: A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is left unread.

Notes:
1.C.G. Jung, CW 10, par. 304
2. Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse, Bollingen Foundation, Pantheon books, New York, 1957, p. 202
3. C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 102
4. King Gudea of Lagash dream, Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Occidental Mythology, p. 117-119
5. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, The Golden Sufi Center, California, 1999
6. Dreams: Visions of the Night, Thames and Hudson, London (no date) editor Jill Purce, p. 18
7. Le Livre du Cueur d’Amours Espris, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975. translation and commentary by F. Unterkircher. Manuscript in The National Library, Vienna
8. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, p. 306
9. C.G. Jung, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, 1939, pp. 44-45
10. Man and His Symbols, p. 52
11. ibid, p. 102
12. Jung, CW 7, par. 210
13. Jung, CW 16, par. 304
14. CW 8, par. 487
15. CW 16, par. 330
16. CW 16, par. 351
17. Alan McGlashan, The Savage and Beautiful Country, Chatto and Windus, London, 1966, p.126 and 132
18. Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit, Routledge, New York, 1996, p. 5
19. ibid, p. 13
20. Edward Tick, War and the Soul, Quest Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 2005, p. 138
21. ibid, p. 1
22. ibid, p. 2
23. ibid, p. 16
24. John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, pp. 20-47 (recounted in Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p. 33

 

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Animals in Dreams:
Reconnecting with the Instinctual Soul

Henri Rousseau La Charmeuse des Serpents

…and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world

                                                                                       — Rilke, Duino Elegies

I have always loved the fairy tales which have an animal guiding the hero or heroine, as in the story of Conneda and the Little Shaggy Horse which I share later in this chapter. (1) In the Louvre, there is a painting by Henri Rousseau called La Charmeuse des Serpents where a woman in a moonlit landscape is playing a reed pipe, enchanting snakes and other animals—a painting which evokes the mysterious world of the dream and the importance of animals in dreams. And not only in dreams, for the ability of humans to understand the thoughts and feelings of animals and to communicate with them has been demonstrated by Amelia Kinkade in her workshops and her books where she explores her ability to “hear” the thoughts of animals and see the world as they see it and teaches people to develop these clairvoyant skills themselves. “Somewhere between poetry and science, somewhere between heaven and earth, clairaudience is born. Clairaudience is the sweetest mystery any human being could ever experience. Fortunately it’s contagious too. We all have amazing powers that we never before dreamed possible…we all have extrasensory perception…It just takes concentration and patience to harness it, develop it and distil it.”(2) As we can connect with and learn from animals in real life, so with the animals that appear in our dreams.
           Animals speak to us from the painted walls of caves in Africa, Australia and Europe where shamans traveled to other dimensions to encounter the souls of the animals the tribe held sacred. All this archaic experience is still alive in us, although deeply buried. Animals have visited us in our dreams for thousands of generations, but what of the animals in dreams today? What do animals represent in relation to ourselves? Surely they symbolize our own primordial soul, a part of our own nature that is older, closer to and more embedded in the life of the natural world. So many fairy tales portray the animal as guide, often appearing just when the hero or heroine has given up, not knowing what to do. As Jung eloquently writes in Psychology and Alchemy: Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy:

The way begins in the children's land, i.e. at a time when the rational present day consciousness was not yet separated from the historical psyche, the collective unconscious. The separation is indeed inevitable, but it leads to such an alienation from that dim psyche of the dawn of mankind that a loss of instinct ensues. The result is instinctual atrophy and hence disorientation in everyday human situations. But it also follows from the separation that the “children's land” will remain definitely infantile and become a perpetual source of childish inclinations and impulses. These intrusions are naturally most unwelcome to the conscious mind, and it consistently represses them for that reason. But the very consistency of the repression only serves to bring about a still greater alienation from the fountainhead, thus increasing the lack of instinct until it becomes lack of soul. (3)

           Animals are one of the primary symbols of the instincts and speak to us in dreams from the older, mammalian and reptilian level of the instinctive primordial soul. The more archaic animals - the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the bear, the wolf, the lion and the tiger personify older layers of the instinct - with the dinosaur or dragon as the oldest of all. Dreams of the domesticated animals - the horse, bull, cow, sheep, goat, dog, and cat - may describe feelings which are closer to the human dimension and, therefore, less threatening to consciousness. How they act, what their relationship is to the dreamer, whether threatening to him or threatened by him; whether they injure or are injured or whether they are in a harmonious relationship with the dreamer—all the different forms they can take are of vital significance for an understanding of what instinct is trying to communicate to us. They can shed light on the nature of the relationship between the conscious personality and those deeper, older levels of our primordial soul of which we may be utterly unconscious.
           All kinds of animals appear in dreams. We may dream of animals which approach in trust and friendliness, or of animals which are wounded and frightened or which attack, rend and devour. They may reveal a deep imprinting on the nervous system that happened when we were children. They may recall an early experience of abject fear when a child felt threatened by a critical or destructive parent or a situation such as the trauma of war. They may reveal the presence of powerful instincts which can be threatening or overwhelming if we neglect or repress them but can be transformed into great energy and creative power if we acknowledge and listen to them. From the way animals present themselves in dreams we may deduce from what level the instinct is trying to send us a message - archaic or more recent - and what feeling it is expressing: happiness, trust and delight, or rage, fear, distress or pain.
           We can learn to recognize which instinct is represented by the different animals we encounter in our own dreams. Sometimes they are much larger than life size and may come to awaken us to their guiding presence or to the fact that we are in the grip of a powerful imprinted belief or forgotten experience that needs to be made conscious in order for the soul to be freed from something that has injured it. In this archetypal form they can also bring healing and insight, becoming guides to mysteries we cannot fathom with our conscious mind alone. Sometimes, as in fairy tales like the story of Conneda and the shaggy horse below, they may even speak to us and turn out to be princes or princesses in disguise.
           Animals in dreams can warn, protect and guide as well as threaten and terrify, just as they can in life. The charge of a rhinoceros or an elephant in a dream can be as deadly as an actual charge in the African bush. If, for example, one can discover what the dream appearance of a hostile or wounded animal means in relation to some event or experience in one's life, the potential threat or unrecognised wound can be transformed into a powerful charge of energy which can be used creatively by us instead of our remaining the victim of its destructive assault. Anyone who has a dog or a cat will know that animals have intelligence, sensitivity to the thoughts and emotions of humans and advance awareness of things that are about to happen, such as their owner returning home after an absence. (4) But we are only just beginning to discover, or rediscover, as Amelia Kinkade has, the range of feelings and thoughts that animals can convey to humans if we learn how to listen and tune in to these.
           The most important approach to dream interpretation is to ask: what does the animal mean to the dreamer, what specific associations and memories of earlier experience does the animal evoke, what feelings does the dreamer have in relation to that animal in life as well as to the dream animal. It is helpful to write these down and keep a careful record of them.
           In my work with clients, whenever a particularly difficult phase in the analysis was encountered, and if no dream of an animal had presented itself, I would ask, “What animal comes to mind?” and then, “What does it look like? What state is it in? Does it have a message it wants to communicate?” Sometimes the animal would be so real to both of us that we would feel as if it were actually in the room. Sometimes the animal would be aggressive, sometimes wounded, sometimes helpless, sometimes dying or dead. Sometimes a dream would follow the session. In either case, I would ask my client to talk to the animal and listen carefully to what it had to say.
           Often, the memory of a childhood (or more recent) grief or trauma may be expressed in the image of a wounded animal—a horse or a dog, but sometimes a wild animal like a deer. Here is an example of a frightening dream of particular significance to a client:

I am in a wood. Suddenly, I am aware that a rhinoceros is charging me from behind. I jump on a mound in terror and it rushes past me, then turns to charge again. I am paralysed with fear.

            The dreamer had come for analysis because of a crippling depression. The rhinoceros was an image of the deep terror and rage arising from a recent experience of physical assault to which she had been subjected. However, analysis gradually uncovered older memories of the childhood experience of a parent’s continual criticism which had led to an unconscious internalized indictment of herself as worthless. Her instinctive childhood delight in life and her original trusting and spontaneous response to it had been killed by that criticism, and with it the possibility of her discovering her true femininity and her creative gifts as well as being able to trust any man sufficiently to have a relationship with him because she was unable to trust herself. The negative pattern of self-destructive criticism had deeply injured the balance of her psyche. Sometimes such a pattern can lead a woman to neglect her safety or her physical health, living a self-destructive pattern such as sexual promiscuity, drug-taking and alcoholism or forming relationships with men who are addicted to any of these patterns. She may be so unconscious of her inner negativity that she cannot recognize the danger she is in. The actual violent attack on my client was the catalyst which helped her to become aware of the situation in the unconscious. Her trauma led her to seek help and become aware of an unconscious self-image that was blocking her path in life.
           Two years later she had a dream that she was riding bareback on an elephant, moving up a gentle slope. From this dream I knew that she was truly in touch with her instincts. She would be safe now because she could trust herself and them. Life would look after her. Her greatest longing was to find the right man to marry and to have children. I did not hear from her for some time but one day received a card with a photograph of herself with two small children, saying that she had met a wonderful man while on a visit to a distant country and was now happily married and the mother of two beautiful children.
           Animals often appear in dreams at key moments of transformation in our lives. To repress or deny the instinctive longing to create can be reflected in a dream like the following:

I am in a zoo, in the house where the lions and tigers are. I see an enormous sabre-tooth tiger in a cage. It is black and the stench coming from it is overpowering. I am afraid.

           This dream revealed a situation where the caged instinct had become as dangerous as a sabre-toothed tiger—dangerous to the person who had this dream and to others. The stench was from the putrifying life that was not allowed to live. The blackness pointed to her unconsciousness of it. The dream was a stark warning from the caged instinct. Several decades later this woman dreamed that a magnificent male tiger came into her bedroom, which was open to the forest beyond. It approached her and suckled from her left breast, then lay down by her bed with its head on its paws.
           The most archaic animals—those which were familiar to Palaeolithic men and women and which were painted on the walls of their caves in south-western France—the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the bear, the auroch or bull and the cave lion—represent in dreams the most archaic instincts that function at the furthest remove from the conscious personality. All of these animals were once a danger to man, and many were the fearsome encounters he had with them as he hunted them or explored the labyrinthine passages of the caves in which they had their lairs. Yet Palaeolithic man lived much closer to the animals than we do and the animal was almost like a brother, another order of life on which he depended for food. Killing this “brother” broke the sacred order and required a ritual to atone for this action and also to invite the protection of the spirit world that would provide further animals for the hunt. To the consciousness of that time, animals did not “die” any more than humans did but were “recycled” from the womb of the Great Mother to supply the food garnered in future hunts. But it was thought necessary that rituals to secure the return of the slain animals were enacted in which the soul of the slain animals was honored and thanked. To this day, hunters in the arctic circle may stroke the head and body of the walrus or whale they have hunted and killed, thanking it for its sacrifice. How different this attitude is to that of the whalers who kill whales for scientific research or for commercial exploitation of the valuable oil extracted from their blubber.
           Over many thousands of years, certain animals came to have immense symbolic significance, in particular the bear, the wolf, the lion and the stag as well as the snake and powerful birds such as the eagle. Along with these, there were insects such as the bee, which was of particular significance in the goddess culture where the queen bee personified the Great Mother. Other insects like the butterfly, the spider, the beetle and the dragonfly were also important. Obviously, different animals lived in different terrain and so which animals were significant depended upon the part of the world where both human and animal lived. These specific animals entered into the mythologies created by the tribe from the earliest beginnings of consciousness and the development of language. For example, Palaeolithic man chose as the totem of the tribe an animal that represented a specific quality he wished to make magically available to the tribe through the practice of ritual. Possibly the tribal shaman would journey to the animal realm and would be told to adopt this totem by the other-world embodiment of an animal or a bird. Today, people who are training to be shamans enter a trance in order to ask for an animal guide to appear. Once it has appeared, the trainee shaman works to develop a relationship with it.
           An example of this close relationship with the spirit world of the animals is found in African and Australian cave paintings. Certain animals such as the eland in Africa carried immense significance in the rituals devised to keep the tribe in touch with the spirit world and to guarantee the continued abundance of the animals hunted for food. Laurens van der Post, in his description of the mythology of the African Bushman, gives many examples of the close interweaving of the life of men, women and animals which give us great insight into the kind of relationship between them that existed many thousands of years ago. All animals, whether of land, sea or air, personify in dreams aspects of the instinct as a manifestation of spirit that can help, guide and protect as well as threaten and destroy.

The Bear
           Certain animals became the totem animal of tribes and then of nations. The bear became the totem animal of Russia, the lion of England, and the eagle of Germany and the United States. In Europe, the bear may be the oldest totem animal, for its ritually arranged remains have been found in caves in the Swiss Alps that were inhabited in the inter-glacial era, before 75,000 BC. To this day, in the Arctic regions nearest to the North Pole, particularly with the Ainu people, the bear still plays a role in shamanic rites. The bear is also one of the oldest images associated with the Great Mother, perhaps because of the way the bear mother cares for her cubs, rearing them alone. Bear mothers made from bone and clay and holding their cubs in the way a human mother holds her child were excavated in the area that the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas named as “Old Europe,” dating to 7000 BC. (5) In Greek times, the bear was sacred to Artemis, the goddess who presided over childbirth. Annually in Athens, little girls, known as arctoi or bear cubs, were chosen to serve as priestesses of the goddess at her festival. Artemis was the goddess of wild or untamed nature, and the animal sacrifices she was believed to require were the most bloody of those offered to the Greek gods and goddesses. This fact should be borne in mind when a bear appears in dreams, for the maternal instinct, if it is totally archaic and unconscious, can destroy as well as nurture. The dream below shows the terror aroused in a young girl by the destructive power of her mother's instinct, of which both were unaware.

I am lying on my bed. Another girl who is like my sister is lying on it with me. A bear comes into the room. I am beside myself with terror and say to it, "Take her,” pointing to the girl beside me.

           In a desperate attempt to save herself, the girl sacrifices her sister - also an aspect of herself - to the bear mother. This is an example of a cautionary dream that warns that “Mother,” whether seen as the Mother-state in politics, “Mother church” or the mother of a family, can devour her children through the unconscious desire to control and direct their lives. If one can become aware of this danger , one can more easily free oneself from its negative power.

The Wolf
           The huge success of a book called Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, should alert us to the fact that she touched on something in the psyche of women that was of great importance and significance, namely, to make them aware of the importance and value of their instincts. The wolf is another wild animal that may appear in dreams. Like the bear, it may have associations with the mother archetype, as it has in the story of Romulus and Remus, the twin babies who were suckled by a she-wolf and grew up to become the founders of Rome. But the word for “wolf” in Rome also designated a harlot who was viewed as a woman who preyed on men. In Greece, the wolf , like the dog, was sacred to the goddess Hecate, who personified the dark side of the moon and, therefore, what is most deeply unconscious from the perspective of the conscious personality. On the whole I think it is true to say that the wolf has usually represented something dangerous and frightening to humans.
           While there have been attempts to domesticate wolves and even stories of extraordinary relationships between men and wolves, wolves seem to appear in people's dreams more as the symbol of a predatory instinctual pattern of behaviour which may cause the dreamer who is unconscious of it to act like “a wolf to man,” as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it. The wolf within, unrecognised and banished to the tundra or darkest forest of our nature, can represent our most predatory instincts and swallow up our humanity. A recent and horrifying example (2008) of someone taken over by his predatory instinct is the Austrian father who kept his daughter prisoner in the cellar of his house for twenty-four years, fathering seven children on her, three of which were imprisoned with her and had never once seen daylight until the day of their release. Another is the paedophiles who sexually abuse children.
           Wherever a child has been savaged by the “wolf” in others, it may in turn behave like a wolf. Hence the terrible murders of children by other children as well as the repetition of the predatory pattern of abuse of other vulnerable children when an abused child becomes an adult. If these traumas remain unacknowledged and untended, the victim or victims may become the predator who unconsciously revenges himself on others for the injury he has sustained, however distant that injury may be in the past.
           Overwhelming rage, hatred and compulsive greed are the end result of rejection, abandonment and cruelty. Wounds festering in the unconscious can have a devastating effect on relationships with others. But the instinct has the power to transform itself if its wounds are recognized and treated. A woman who had endured a tormented childhood and was often taken over by uncontrollable rage had this dream after she had understood the cause of her rage and the possibility of it being transformed:

A wolf is being skinned. It is a very painful process. I sit by its side and stroke its head to soothe it. Because of my sympathy for it, it allows the process to continue.

           The dream reminded her of the story of St. Francis meeting with the wolf of Gubbio, which pledged to the Saint as it placed a paw in his hand, not to molest and kill the people of that city any more. The creation of a relationship with a dangerous instinct may transform it from lethal enemy into friend and ally.

The Snake
           The snake is one of the most fascinating of all dream images, difficult to interpret as it can mean so many different things to different people. It has so many associations and meanings, and plays so important a role in mythology and dreams that it would require volumes to explore its significance. To some people, the snake symbolizes good, to others, evil. To some it is an image of healing, to others an image which inspires absolute terror and revulsion. Because of its ability to slough off its skin and regenerate itself, the snake is one of the oldest images of life’s power to renew itself. Over immense periods of time, in many different cultures, it became an image of spirit, both the eternal spirit of life in general, and the life spirit of the individual, the quintessence or core of his or her being.
           The anthropologist Peter Worsley, in his book The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia, gives an example of what the snake may signify in the shamanic cultures that still survive in the modern world:

The snake is commonly identified in New Guinea with the old Man or Woman, the Demiurge who created men, animals, tools and social groups alike. The snake symbol has further significance in representing the essence or soul, the continuing vital part of the organism which persists eternally while the outer husk of the body dies and is sloughed off...snakes and lizard frequent men's houses, which they enter unseen from the wild. They are thus friendly towards men, but at the same time potentially very dangerous. This makes them peculiarly suitable symbols for the ancestors who keep a close watch on the affairs of the living, and who are helpful if placated, but vengeful if mishandled. The symbol of the snake thus combines a number of symbolic ideas fused into one, and is particularly rich in its associations and overtones. It symbolises human fertility because of its phallic implications, but it also symbolises the fertility of non-human animal life and natural life in general… Because it never dies, it transcends all these narrow implications, and stands for the cycle of life itself, the continuity of the whole cosmos and the perpetuation of the soul...The snake is also a nigh-universal symbol of rebirth...It is the sloughing off of the skin which has given rise to the universal association of the snake with resurrection and regeneration. (6)

           The snake lives in the desert, in the jungle, in rivers, swamps and oceans, under stones and in secret hidden places. It moves with lightning swiftness yet with a graceful, undulating movement. It can suffocate, poison and devour yet it is also an age-old symbol of healing. In dreams it can be both an image of archaic fear, yet also a symbol of the creative spirit. It is the oldest known image of the wisdom of instinct. The deeper levels of the soul carry a charge of great danger but they also contain the potential of undreamed of powers of healing and renewal. Our reptilian brain is our oldest brain system and functions in us as the autonomic nervous system below the threshold of our consciousness. Yet how miraculous the working of this system is and how severely it can be injured or destroyed by the way we live our lives or the way we treat each other, particularly our children.
           The serpent or snake, like the dragon, is the traditional guardian of the treasure. In the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Greece, it was the symbol of wisdom, power and healing until, with the rise of the patriarchal religions, it came to symbolize deception and evil because it was associated with the tempting of Eve in the Myth of the Fall.
           In Bronze Age Egypt and Sumer, goddess and serpent are seen together—the serpent representing her power to regenerate life. In Egypt, Pharoah's crown carried the image of the cobra, the uraeus, symbol of the goddess Hathor, from whom flowed his power to rule Egypt. The Cretan goddess carried serpents in both hands as a symbol of her power to bestow both life and death. The goddess Athene wore the Gorgon's head wreathed in snakes upon her breast and, in a magnificent statue of her from the archaic temple on the Acropolis, snakes undulate along the edges of her robe.
           In Greece, Aesculepius, the god of healing, was always shown with a snake coiled by his side. This ancient image of healing has come down to us as the two snakes twined about the staff of Hermes or Mercury, which today has become the symbol of the medical profession.
           In the West, the image of the serpent is deeply implicated in the role it played in the drama of the Garden of Eden in tempting Eve to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. As the primary symbol of the goddess’s power of regeneration, it was vilified in this myth, punished by God and condemned to bite man’s heel and to be bruised and crushed by it. Unsurprisingly, in the Christian tradition, because of its role in the Myth of the Fall, the serpent came to be viewed as a symbol of evil, even of the devil himself.
           An altogether different approach is found in the East where the serpent is ubiquitous as a symbol of life’s creative and destructive power. It is found most strongly represented in the magnificent temples of Angkor in Cambodia and in countless temple sculptures throughout India and south-east Asia. Often, the Buddha is shown seated on the coils of a gigantic serpent whose seven cobra heads fan out behind him to form a protective canopy. To have the serpent as guardian and guide rather than adversary means that what was blind and unconscious and in its primordial state in us has been raised to full consciousness. In the Eastern traditions, the power of the primordial instinct to kill and destroy has been transformed into compassion for all life and the power to heal.

The Buddha protected by Mucalinda

           This greatest potential achievement of human consciousness is symbolised in Indian mystical teaching by the journey of the serpent goddess Kundalini from the lowest chakra at the base of the spine to the highest chakra at the crown of the head where the twin masculine and feminine conduits of the life energy meet in the central channel – the sushuma – and flower into the thousand-petalled lotus. The long and arduous journey of the instinct from an unconscious state to full consciousness accomplishes its transformation from blind archaic impulse to the highest expression of wisdom and compassion. In the Buddha’s words, “Incomparable are those who are Awake.”
           We can see everywhere, both in people's personal lives and in the world as a whole, that instinct acting blindly and unconsciously brings untold suffering and evil into being. As long as we shut off this greatly feared instinctual part of ourselves from our awareness, it has the power to take over our fragile consciousness by triggering responses to events that happen to us or by powering negative projections onto other people. But it is also an incomparable guide and ally, and dreams often show it in this guise.
           Some people are afraid of being bitten by snakes or suffocated by their coils, yet others can be completely at home with them. Few may realise, when dreaming of a snake, that they are receiving a message from the deepest layers of the primordial soul. The instinctual layers of the soul carry a charge of great danger - even mortal peril - but they also carry the potential of undreamed of powers of healing, as the two snakes winding around the caduceus of Hermes suggest. Dreams of snakes need, therefore, to be given great attention.
The snake-bite in a dream can be a warning, making one aware that something is amiss in the depths of the psyche, perhaps initiating an awakening to a dangerous pattern of unconscious instinctuality that can range from inertia, through greed and jealousy, to addictions of all kinds or to violent rage. Yet the snake-bite that seems to be so painful, frightening or even deadly can mark the beginning of a process of awakening, healing and transformation, as my own dream of the giant serpent, described in Chapter Two, did for me. A woman engaged in creating a relationship with these depths dreamed the following:

I am swimming in a stream which wanders through a beautiful tropical paradise. Beneath me are the bodies of many huge snakes which are lying at the bottom of the stream. I am a little afraid but they seem very peaceful and I swim on inches above them with a sense of trust and delight.

Another client, a man who became a writer during the course of his analysis, dreamed:

I am walking up a grassy incline in front of a beautiful country house. There is a line of trees on either side and a woman is walking with me. Accompanying us on both sides as we climb the slope is an enormous snake. I remember that there was a general sense of beneficence rather than fear and that I also associated this feeling with my creativity.

           The snake in dreams can give us an image of what is happening at the level of the autonomic nervous system, for the snake personifies our oldest brain system, the reptilian brain. Since our health and well-being and, indeed, our life, depend on the healthy functioning of these autonomic processes, a snake in great distress or in pain can be interpreted as an image of a disruption or interference with them which could lead, ultimately, to a fatal illness and to death. This dream of a woman at the beginning of her analysis alarmed me because it suggested that she was in great danger, even that her life was threatened:

I am in a garden shed. A man has told me to impale a huge snake on a meat hook. It has eight sections and hangs limply, as though dead.

           Her instinctual life had been so cut off from her conscious self that she was completely unaware of her suffering. For years she had endured the pain and persecution of an unhappy marriage, trying to be a good mother to her children, and literally denying the value of her own life in a pattern of unconscious sacrifice. In living her life in this way, she was following her mother's own pattern of self-sacrifice which she had absorbed as a child. The dream gave her an image of the plight and the suffering of her instinctual life, as well as insight into the controlling masculine power in her psyche which had told her to impale the snake on the meat hook, as if she had no choice. Two instinctive levels of the psyche were in conflict with each other. The one reflected a pattern of learned behaviour that had been imprinted on her as a child by her stern, controlling father, who had ruled her mother and the household with a rod of iron. The other reflected her denied feelings of distress. She ruled her own life with the same rigid control, never listening to her feelings of exhaustion, pain and despair. This “stiff upper lip” attitude is characteristic of women who have had a strong religious or disciplinary indoctrination from a controlling parent in their childhood. The impaled snake gave her an image of her repressed unconscious feelings, specifically her denied sexual and emotional needs. The strain of carrying the tension of the conflict was exhausting her and even threatening her life. Another dream of a wounded and flagellated horse whose flesh was hanging in ribbons, brought this message home to her. About a year later, having become aware of the suffering she was carrying in her heart, she at last began to listen to her feelings and dreamed the following:

I am holding a baby alligator in my arms. I stroke it and cuddle it, then it slips from my grasp and I lose it. Later I find it again in a cave and it has grown into an adult with eight sections to its body.

           Sometime after this dream, she left her husband and entered into a rewarding relationship with another man with whom she could share her life and her interests.

Creatures of the Deep: the Crocodile, Whale, Dolphin, Octopus
           Watching a crocodile devour an animal or a human being is a horrifying experience and crocodiles in dreams, speaking to us from the oldest level of the limbic brain, can arouse primordial fear in the same way as a dinosaur would. Yet the dream above shows the crocodile or alligator in a different light. I remember reading about a group of people living on the banks of a river in the Sudan. Apparently the crocodiles in this region are not aggressive towards humans nor are humans afraid of them. Children climb on their backs, swim with them and are totally at ease with them.

The Whale
           People all over the world have been appalled by the spectacle of the whale-hunt and have made strenuous efforts to outlaw it. It seems so barbaric, so predatory and so wrong that man should kill this wonderful mammal. Equally, evidence is coming to light that naval exercises in the deep ocean have disturbed and disoriented whales, driving them inshore to die by the dozen.
           The New Zealand Aboriginal film Whale Rider illustrates both the loss of the shamanic connection with whales and its recovery through the extraordinary courage of a young girl. This film draws attention to the recent phenomenon of people wanting to swim with whales and dolphins, as if trying to recover the feeling of that ancient relationship with these creatures of the deep and, at the same time, recovering the lost connection to their instincts. People return exhilarated as well as deeply moved by these encounters. Sometimes, their lives change out of all recognition as a result of them, particularly the lives of children. These types of encounters have been filmed many times and it is an incredibly beautiful sight to see someone swimming with dolphins or with a whale and her calf, gracefully keeping in tune with their movements and seeming able to communicate with them and draw an empathic response.
           In 2006 a story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle that described the rescue of a female humpback whale that had become entangled in a spider web of hundreds of pounds of crab traps and yards of ropes. These had all become wrapped around her body and her tail, with a line tugging at her mouth. A fisherman saw her struggling and radioed an environmental group for help. They decided that they could only release her by trying to untangle the web of ropes in which she was enmeshed. For hours, at great risk to themselves, they worked with curved knives to free her. When she was eventually freed, the divers said that at first she swam in joyous circles. Then she swam up to each and every one of them and gently nudged him. She pushed them around, as if saying, “Thank you.” The man who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eye was following him the whole time. He said he will never be the same after that experience. Others said it was the most moving and beautiful experience of their lives. What a contrast this story offers to the totally unnecessary killing of the whales by the Japanese and other whaling fleets.
           Years ago I had a dream that I was on a liner with many other passengers. I was looking out to sea while the others were on the other side of the ship. Suddenly, an enormous whale rose out of the water and headed straight for the ship. It was so huge that I thought it would capsize it, but as the whale approached it became clear that it simply wished to communicate with us. I saluted it and thanked it for showing itself. I took the dream as a message to humanity, traveling in the ship of consciousness, unaware of the great sea of the soul and its messenger, the whale.

The Dolphin
           Dolphins appear often in people’s dreams. I remember a client’s dream where a dolphin swam towards her and kissed the palm of her hand. This dream was so inspiring that she began writing a novel.
           In 2008, an incident was reported suggesting that dolphins have an empathic instinct similar to humans that could we directed to protecting other species. A group of dolphins began to circle closely some life guards who were swimming off the coast of New Zealand, calling to more dolphins for help and tightening the circle in such a way that no-one could break out of it, banging their tails on the water and making a tremendous rumpus. After three quarters of an hour of treading water till they were all exhausted, one man did eventually dive out of the circle and saw what had given rise to the dolphins’ extraordinary behavior – a great white shark was circling the group, waiting for an opportunity to attack. Eventually, it gave up and swam away. The dolphins by their protective action had saved the lives of five exhausted and perplexed people who were unaware of the danger that threatened them.
           In March 2008, another recent eye-witness account from the North Island of New Zealand (14/3/2008), reported how a dolphin known to the human observers as Moko had come to the aid of a pygmy sperm whale and her calf which had repeatedly beached themselves on a sandy bank. Whereas the efforts of humans had failed, the dolphin continually called to the whales, eventually persuading mother and calf to move out into the open sea. As Audrey Manning, Emeritus Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, comments, “This would be one of the most amazing cases of inter-species cooperation ever recorded, especially as from Moko’s perspective it appears to be an entirely selfless act.”
           In her article she brought up other examples of altruistic behavior on the part of animals, in particular the story told to her by a game warden in South Africa of an elephant who had lost most of its trunk. This elephant should have died very quickly but instead, it was being kept alive by other elephants who used their own trunks to suck up water from the water-hole and squirt it into the mouth of the injured elephant. “For an animal to show that sort of empathy for another and to follow it up with genuinely altruistic behaviour is nothing short of astonishing.” We could take note of these examples and understand that our own capacity for empathy and compassion may derive ultimately from the archaic programming of our mammalian brain.

The Octopus
           Encountering the octopus or sea-monster in dreams can be a terrifying experience, particularly if one is dragged down by its tentacles or limbs far below the surface of the sea. A client had a dream that a huge sea-monster had attacked a ship and dragged it down into the depths. This was the beginning of uncovering a long-forgotten childhood trauma—an experience of sexual abuse by a grandfather of which neither of us had any idea at the beginning of her analysis.

The Domesticated Animals
           The domesticated animals - those who have lived closer to human habitations—such as the bull, cow, horse, pig, dog and cat—may personify a level of the instinct that is closer to and, therefore, more accessible to the conscious personality. All these animals were, in past civilizations, associated with the Goddess: the cow with Hathor in Egypt and Inanna in Sumer, the bull with the rites of the Cretan goddess and the Greek god, Dionysus, the pig with Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the horse with Athene, the dog with Hecate and the cat with Isis. It is helpful, when interpreting dreams, to hold these ancient associations, as well as more personal ones, in mind. In the Islamic tradition, pork may have been considered an unclean food because the pig was once sacred to the goddess (because of its fertility). As the goddess was replaced by Allah as supreme deity, so her sacred food became unclean.

The Bull
           Many women have dreams of being pursued by a bull. Writers and analysts often associate the bull with un-integrated sexuality, and there the dream interpretation rests. But the image of the bull is so fascinating and complex that, just as with the snake, a book could be written on its symbolism alone. In Bronze Age lunar culture, the bull like all horned animals, represented the life-giving potential of nature, associated with the horns of the crescent moon and sacred from time immemorial to the goddess. It was the principal animal symbol of her dying and resurrected son who personified the eternally regenerating life force of the earth. Bulls were sacred animals in the lunar culture of the Bronze Age. In Crete, the dangerous art of bull-vaulting was a part of sacred ritual in the courtyard of the temple at Knossos. In ancient Greece, white bulls were sacrificed to Poseidon, the god of the sea. The god Dionysus was often portrayed as a bull and bulls were sacrificed to him and their raw flesh eaten in a ritual feast. Later, in the Mithraic rituals of the Roman period, the blood of the sacrificed animal drenched the initiate standing beneath a special platform. Any or all of these ancient images stand behind the dream image of the bull today, held in our unconscious collective memory, for the soul does not forget such things.
           If someone is not in a right relationship with this creative energy, it can turn negative and destructive; its horns can toss, rend and kill. It can metaphorically attack in a headlong charge of violent rage that can be a danger to others as well as oneself, since someone who is in the power of such a strong instinct, may be “beside him-or-herself,” crashing around like a bull in a china shop. However, the frightening dream experience of being chased by a bull might be the only way that a person’s attention can be drawn to something of vital importance that is being denied expression. A bull appearing in a dream in a way that frightens the dreamer can be a warning of the need to become aware of powerful instincts that are threatening the dreamer or can indicate the need to find a channel of expression for a deeply denied longing to create or to heal. The bull is, after all, the symbol of St. Luke, the healer-physician. It often seems to me that people charged by bulls in their dreams are unable to recognize and acknowledge their creative gifts or their ability to heal. A woman who had countless dreams of being chased by a bull finally had a dream in which she was sitting by one, singing to it, while the bull listened to her song, enchanted. In another dream she watched astounded as a handsome man climbed out of a bull’s skin, exactly as fairy tales describe this kind of transformation.
           One of Jung's colleagues, Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz, told an amusing story of a client of hers whom she knew had the talent to write, but who insisted that he was not a writer. One day he came to her with a dream in which he was being chased by an enormous bull. Running for his life, at the last minute he leapt over a fence and looked back. The bull had risen up on top of the fence as if to leap over it after him, and as he did so his extended penis was exposed. At the end of his penis was a ball-point pen! The unconscious could hardly have given a clearer or more witty message to the dreamer. “After that,” Dr. von Franz commented, “he wrote an excellent thesis.” (7)

The Horse
           One of my favorite stories is told by Heinrich Zimmer in his book, The King and the Corpse. Conneda, son of the king and queen of Connaught in Ireland, sets out on a quest which takes him into a forest. There he meets a Druid who tells him to mount the little shaggy horse he will shortly come across, to let the reins fall loose on its neck and to let it guide him where it will. Conneda does as he is told, mounts the horse and is taken first beneath the deep waters of a lake and then over a mountain flaming with fire. The burns he sustains in the flames are healed by a magic bottle of elixir—All-Heal—which, the little horse tells him, is concealed in one of his ears. Surviving these dangers and trials, Conneda is told by the little horse to kill him, flay his hide and afterwards anoint the remains with the elixir. Deeply distressed at having to kill his friend, Conneda nevertheless does as instructed and is amazed to see a handsome prince, who had been changed into the form of the horse by a wicked wizard, emerge from the flayed remains of his faithful friend. The prince takes him into a fairy city where his brother gives Conneda the magic trophies he has set out to find.
           At times the horse in dreams seems to symbolize the instinct that, so to speak, carries the conscious personality on its back. The attitude of the conscious self towards the horse that carries it is of vital importance. A book called The Man Who Listens to Horses by Monty Roberts and the film, The Horse Whisperer, have shown the incredible sensitivity and capacity of the horse to respond to gentle training by the person who has the patience and empathy to create a relationship with it and to wait for the horse’s own response to the man or woman standing in the center of the ring. For centuries, it was thought that the horse’s will had to be “broken” before it would accept saddle, bridle and rider. Now attitudes are changing. The sight of a dressage horse moving absolutely in tune with the music being played and in sympathy with the leg and hand movements of its rider is one of the most moving and beautiful things that it is possible to see.
           In dreams, therefore, it is important to be aware of how the horse is behaving. Is it able to move freely, even under the control of the bridle or, if unbridled, to gallop in freedom across the land? Is it out of control, too tightly bridled, exhausted, lame or injured? Does it call to mind the sculptor Maraini’s final statue of a horse and its rider where the horse is shown forced into an unnatural position, almost a scream of tortured anguish? Perhaps this statue symbolizes the predicament of the instinct which has to endure the suffering we force on it by our conscious attitudes.
           The horse can also represent the body in dreams. The horse as body carries us faithfully through life. Often its rider has no idea that its weight has become burdensome to the animal-instinct. Our intense relationship with our animals—horse, dog or cat—represents the externalized expression of a relationship that could be established with our own instinct. It too could benefit from the same quality of compassionate attention and affection we give to our animals. That caring attention may, in fact, calm and soothe our own instinct. Recently, it has been found that taking dogs into children’s hospital wards and old people’s homes helps them to recover more quickly and to feel much happier.
           Here is a dream of a deeply wounded horse, representative of a woman’s traumatized nervous system:

There was a movement behind me, to the left and I saw a horse, a lovely palomino/gold horse with a pale muzzle. I could see its jaw was somehow distorted, the muzzle enlarged - as if its lower lip jutted forward below the top. It was bleeding too, its skin hanging in ribbons. As it turned towards me, I saw the flesh of its right shoulder shredded and bunched together like a knot of ribbons. A woman said it was in a terrible way, and implied it should really be put down.

           Asked to relate this image to what might have happened to her as a child, her six-year-old self came back to her. She suddenly remembered that she had been given a wonderful Chinese painting of chrysanthemums by a friend of her parents, in the expectation that she would color it. She had been thrilled and did indeed color in the flowers but then, wanting to add something to the magic, she had cut pictures of fairies and flowers and other images she loved out of her books and pasted them onto the picture. When her parents saw what she had done, she was severely beaten (beatings were a regular occurrence in her family). Not understanding why her parents were so angry with her, she was deeply imprinted with the idea that her instinctive and joyous impulse to create was wrong or bad and would invite punishment. This was the primal wound to her limbic brain that lay behind the image of the bleeding and flayed palomino horse. The negative charge of that experience affected her life forty years after it happened, giving rise to severe episodes of depression whenever she embarked on a commission or tried to express her creativity (she was an artist). Imprinted on her nervous system was the expectation of punishment if she took up her brushes and dared to express her creative gift.
           Here is the dream of a dyslexic twelve-year-old girl, deeply distressed by her difficulties at school and unsure of her path in life:

I am with a little old man with a long white beard who takes me up to the attic of a house. It is empty except for twelve trunks. We look into each of the trunks and they are all empty until we come to the last. In this one there is nothing save a tiny black horse with a jewelled saddle and bridle, studded with rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds. The horse is alive. The old man hands it to me.

           Unsurprisingly perhaps, the girl became fascinated by horses, became an event rider and a highly respected riding teacher.

Birds
           As long ago as the Neolithic era, birds were regarded as messengers of the Great Mother. All birds were sacred to her, among them the crane, the swan, the goose, duck, owl, diver bird and vulture as well as smaller birds like the dove and the swallow. These find their way into later mythologies and into fairy tales that tell of the magical guidance of swans, doves or hoopoes, as in the famous twelfth century Sufi story of The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud Din Attar. In dreams birds may appear as messengers of the soul.
           Years ago, in the spring of 1983, a journalist called Christopher Booker wrote two articles in the Daily Telegraph (UK) recounting people’s experience with owls which seemed to announce the death of someone close to them. I kept these articles because I found them so interesting and have drawn on them to write this section. After giving several examples of owls as connected with death, he drew attention to the fact that people both in the past and present who lived on the most intimate terms with the rhythms of the life around them, saw themselves “… as part of an unending cosmic drama in which everything which happens, both in their own lives and in that of nature around them, is mysteriously interrelated. They perceive a dimension to existence which in our hyperconscious civilisation we have almost entirely lost touch with – and which is vital to their profound reverence for the whole business of being alive.”
           A month later, he wrote a second article, having received many moving letters about people’s experience of owls acting as “messengers” of the imminent death of someone close to them or returning to comfort the bereaved some time after their death.
           One story in particular seemed to stand out. A woman wrote describing how her husband had been fascinated by owls and had photos of them around the house. On the first anniversary of her husband’s death, when she had awakened feeling desperately sad and lonely, she became aware of an owl calling in the distance. “I stopped and listened. It came closer, hooting at intervals, and finally settled in the tree outside my window, where it ceased hooting and made a series of clucking, comforting noises which sounded so comical that I burst out laughing. I closed my eyes, and slept in great peace till the morning.”
           “It is said,” writes a woman of Cherokee descent in a recent book, Mind Before Matter: Visions of a New Science of Consciousness, “that at one time the animals, the stones, the many forms of life and humans spoke the same language. This changed and the animals and the other forms of life stopped speaking to aid humans in their learning of many things, among them, listening.” (8) Maybe, when people were still able to listen, even the stones spoke to them the way one did to me in my dream, recounted in Chapter Thirteen. In earlier shamanic cultures, people would have been aware that the animal and the human world interacted with a hidden dimension of reality. They would have observed and taken note of the messages transmitted from this dimension through what Jung called “synchronicities,” among them the appearance or unusual behaviour of an animal or bird, whether in dream or waking reality, that seemed to bring a message from a loved one who had died or was about to die or who had come to communicate a warning to humans. (9)
            As my understanding deepened, I realized that birds can personify the soul itself, bringing messages to our conscious self through the medium of the dream. The hoopoe has held great numinosity for me ever since I read the Sufi story of The Conference of the Birds. It deepened as I worked on the text of my children’s book, The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time. So when a close friend of mine had several dreams about the hoopoe, a most beautiful bird with black and white striped wings, a pink breast and a striking crest, which can be seen in southern Europe and countries around the Mediterranean, I felt it came to life for both of us. While on holiday in Crete she had a dream that three hoopoes appeared to her as she lay in a dark cave, one of them feeding from her hand.

I was lying on my right side, exactly as I was in reality, and seemed to be in a dark cave. The ceiling was low. To my right, at the mouth of the cave, I could see a sliver of light. It became brighter, illuminating a shelf of soft green grass at the entrance. Over this shelf stepped a hoopoe. I said in amazement: "Robert (my husband) will not believe this." Another hoopoe stepped into the cave behind it. The first bird flew towards me, over my body, becoming slightly heavier and greyer, its beak more parrot-like. It flew down to my right hand and started feeding from it, although I could not imagine what I might have upon which it could feed. It rejoined its companion at the cave mouth, becoming more like a true hoopoe again. A third hoopoe entered, I remember little else of the dream, except my voice saying: "I do believe." When I woke I felt like a child that had been given exactly what it had asked for. It was my birthday. All day the palm of my right hand itched uncomfortably. When I got home, the research began.

           She was so moved and inspired by this dream and others in which the hoopoe again appeared that she wrote an MA thesis on the history and mythological meaning of the hoopoe. In the prologue to her thesis she wrote:

In the Sufi tradition of Islam, one symbol of the soul's guide is the hoopoe, King Solomon's bird, “messenger of the Presence and courier of the Invisible”. In my own dreams, and in states between waking and sleeping, the hoopoe has appeared, bringing with it a sense of numinosity. Such appearances have led me back, through Sufi, Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought, to Greek myth , and to the soul journeys of the ancient Egyptians...Imagination is the liminal place where Heaven and Earth meet, the place of soul and its transformation. It is the place where the hoopoe is guide, mediating between God and humankind.

The Butterfly
           The butterfly is one of the oldest symbols of transformation and regeneration, No one who, as a child, has waited for a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly can forget the moment when the earth-bound caterpillar turns into the beautiful, fragile winged creature that can fly. Together, these two aspects of a single life-form suggested that the soul could survive the death of the outworn “form” of the body. In the Cretan seal below in the left upper quadrant, above the heads of the young couple seated on a branch, there are two chrysalises becoming butterflies, signifying the release of the soul into the “Immortal Realm”.

Cretan Seal from Pylos

The Bee
           In 2007 we heard that honey bees were dying all over the world and are becoming an endangered species. Colonies are collapsing and the cause is not known—whether it is parasitic mites, the effects of climate change, a virus—or stress resulting from bees being transported huge distances to pollinate specific crops in order to “maximize profits.” There is a theory put forward by a group of bee-keepers that the collapse of the hives is due to the introduction of queens from foreign countries being sent by post to their remote destinations. There is a risk that the harvests of fruit and all the crops that bees pollinate will be affected. Einstein apparently warned that if the bee disappears off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left - a rather alarming thought (Sunday Times article 1/2/09).
           Ancient cultures would have been appalled by our casual treatment of the bees because their dying would have meant that the Goddess was withdrawing her blessing from the earth and that life would no longer be regenerated. Both the butterfly and the bee belong to the lunar mythology of the Great Mother. The intricate cellular network that secretes the golden essence of life is an image of the Web of Life which secretes the treasure of wisdom that is “sweeter than honey or the honey-comb.” (S. of Songs)
           The bee held a particular importance in Cretan mythology. A beautiful golden seal was found buried in a tomb near Knossos, dating to 1450 BC and depicting the goddess and her priestesses in the form of bees dancing with a child in a field of lilies. (picture) Honey was used to embalm the dead in great jars or pithoi in Crete. The stone omphalos at Delphi had the shape of a beehive and the oracular priestess of Apollo at Delphi was called the Delphic Bee. The bee priestesses of Crete reappear in Greece as the three bee-maidens or wise women who taught Apollo how to prophesy. The priestesses of Demeter were called Melissae (bees) and the goddess herself was sometimes portrayed as a beehive and named as the “Mother-Bee”. In some cultures, bees were thought to be the souls of the dead. The sound of bees humming was believed to be the voice of the goddess, the secret creative sound of life itself. In an extraordinary and beautifully written book called The Shamanic Way of the Bee, the author, Simon Buxton, tells the story of his initiation into the rich and ancient tradition of “The Path of Pollen” at the hands of a Bee-master who taught him the practices, rituals and tools of bee shamanism during an apprenticeship that lasted thirteen years. (10)
           Something of these ancient associations comes through in this extraordinary dream of a friend of mine, a poet and an artist. In previous dreams she had walked through a town or building with many rooms, searching for something precious, but to no avail:

In a waking dream I walk in an empty town that had many arched cells and white walls. I pass a young man dressed in a white gown. His legs were apart, as if to span two thousand years. His brown hair curled from his crown, a halo stiff with aromatic propolis. In a shaft of light, his dome-shaped head was alive with bees, a human hive. Bees flew out and in from his ears and eyes. Honey trickled over the lower lip of his generous mouth. He seemed alive with the humming of bees inside his head. As though half asleep he slowly raised his eyes to gaze at the light in the window above. I stood amazed to see his eyelids were fringed with a flickering border of bees. His bowed eyebrows were a crowded landing place. I fell in love and my tongue became sweet with honey. I knew that inside his head was the golden Comb of perfect order, the space within for the One and All. Stung into life, I started back, my slow feet stuck with honey. I struggled to the crack of light where two figures came with a shroud for my beloved. Veiled in a cloud of bee-proof gauze, they touched his honeyed fingers with their gloved hands saying, “Why call us here today? This Fellow is the Host, the Keeper of Bees. Go on your way.”

My dream became a poem
And the poem a journey
Beyond dreams, beyond time
Beyond Being.

           Later she wrote: “It seems to me that all that I think I know is that we beings on earth, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, are of the same substance and are all part of a larger being. Just as we have countless cells in our body, we are the numberless cells in the body of the being we call God.”
          At the end of The Divine Feminine, I included a poem that I had written years ago:
                           

Beehive Source
Trellised Womb
Mother of all beginnings
Hold me, gather me, feed me
With the honey-nectar from the hive.
Nourished, I will sing the Bee-Song
The long-forgotten threnody
Of praise to Thee.

The Power of the Imagination
           The imagination has extraordinary power to heal. The imaginative relationship we can create with the primordial brain has the power to alter the neuronal pathways, replacing negative messages with positive ones, re-structuring the responses of the sympathetic nervous system, healing the heart and releasing the creative impulse of life to flow in the direction it seeks.
           This is why it is important to pay attention to the animal, reptile, bird or insect which appears in our dreams. Through this image, we can enter into a dialogue with the most archaic part of ourselves as an actual entity that has consciousness, intelligence, feelings, and the possibility of communicating with us. Many of you who read this will be familiar with the image of the inner child that has been the focus of therapy in the past few years. But what about the inner animal? There are many animals, as well as birds and fish that may carry specific meaning for you. Stop a moment as you read this. What animal image presents itself to you, flitting across the screen of the mind? Through this image, you can enter into a dialogue with your instinct not as a something, but as a someone—as an actual entity that has consciousness and feelings and the ability to communicate with you.
           For centuries we have been taught that instinctive feelings are dangerous or sinful and must be repressed and rigidly controlled. Therefore, the creation of an empathic relationship with this much-maligned part of ourselves is essential to the healing process. The crucial point I want to make here is that like the Beast in the story of “Beauty and the Beast,” this part of our nature does not have the power to release itself from the programming it has received and in which it is imprisoned. It can only signal its plight to us through emotional or physical symptoms of distress and through addictive patterns of behavior which reflect and reveal this distress. Instinct is dependent on our conscious mind to become aware of its suffering and to find ways of releasing it from its prison and healing its pain. It may, to begin with, be deeply resistant to any attempt to enter into contact with it in the way a wounded animal may reject an attempt to draw near it. But once the relationship is established, it has extraordinary power to heal itself. This is as true for society as a whole as it is for the individual. The relationship between the two aspects of our nature—the conscious mind and the instinctive soul—can be healed and made whole.
           What was the animal image that came to mind as you read this chapter? What instinct or feeling does it reflect? Can you ask it to show you what gave rise to that instinct or feeling? Did it threaten or frighten you, or did it approach you trustingly as if it wanted to befriend you? How did you react to this creature emerging from the depths of yourself—with fear and dislike, or with empathy and interest? It may be helpful to re-read some fairy tale you remember in which an animal played a part. Again, see what story first comes to mind and perhaps look for the book in your shelves that holds that story. Perhaps you may remember a favorite story you loved as a child.
           Once a relationship is established with this part of yourself, ask it to tell you its story. Write that story down, exactly as if you were listening to and recording a fairy tale. You will be amazed and fascinated to read what this hitherto unknown part of yourself has to say.
           As it becomes aware of your interest and your empathy, this part of yourself may speak to you, telling you what has happened to it, explaining how it feels, even offering suggestions as to how it can be helped. Write these down and keep a record of your dialogue. As you pay attention to this neglected part of yourself, the flow of life, the flow of a creative relationship with life that has been blocked by neglect or trauma begins to be released. Something begins to awaken in you that has been held paralysed, frozen, turned to stone, something that may have been buried alive.
           With the creation of an empathic relationship with the deep animal soul, toxic emotions and the toxic neuronal chemistry in the body/mind organism that accompany them begin to change. Other pathways in the brain and the nervous system are activated. Where fear and anger were the primary response to life, trust and love and a sense of joy begin to replace them.
           We need to create a space for this vital part of ourselves, a space where it is free to speak to us and where we can listen to what it has to tell us. We need to enchant it by telling it myths and fairy tales. We can play music to it. We can ask it to dance, paint pictures of it, act out its story, releasing the buried memories held in the muscular system of the body. We can respond to its longings, notice the signals it sends us. By our empathic attention, we free it from the black hole of our neglect. We restore to it the hope it had lost, the happiness it never thought to experience. By doing this, we transform its sorrow into joy, its fear into hope. Treating this “unconscious” part of us as if it were a person aligns our different brain systems so they can begin to function harmoniously with less conflict and tension. With this encouragement, the life of the soul begins to flower in some form of creative expression. We release the authentic voice of the soul that may have been held prisoner by our failure to connect with it.

Notes:
1. Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse, Bollingen Foundation, Pantheon Books, New Yoork, 1957, p. 26
2. Amelia Kinkade, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth (2001) and The Language of Miracles, New World Library, USA, 2006.
3. C.G. Jung, CW12, Psychology and Alchemy: Dream Symbolism in relation to Alchemy, p.
4. Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, 2000
5. Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984
6. Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia
7. The Way of the Dream, a book based on documentary film of that name, Windrose Films Ltd., Toronto, 1988; editors Fraser Boa and Jenny Donald, p. 128
8 . Cherokee woman Mind Before Matter: Visions of a New Science of Consciousness, O Books, Hampshire, UK, 2008
9. I have a friend called Peter Kingsley who, a few years ago, wrote a book on Parmenides and his shamanic journey into the realm of the goddess Persephone. In relation to the attack of 9/11/01 he wrote a remarkable description of a communication from a raven that held deep meaning for him and could have for us. You can find the whole experience along with his comments, to which he gave the title ‘Raven’s Appearance: The Language of Prophecy’, by clicking on http://www.peterkingsley.org/pages.cfm?ID=7
10. Simon Buxton, The Shamanic Way of the Bee, Destiny books, Rochester, Vermont, 2004

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Survival of the Soul

Hieronymous Bosch - 1450-1516 The Ascent into the Empyrean

There is no death, only a change of worlds…
                                                    
                                                                   — Native American Chief
For life is eternal and love is immortal
and death is only an horizon,
and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
                                                       
                                                                   — Anonymous


No book on the soul can be complete without a consideration of death and what happens to us when we die. It is truly astonishing that after millennia of human life on this planet and all the vast amount of knowledge that is now available to us, we still know virtually nothing about the most mysterious, challenging and awesome experiences of our lives - our birth and our death. From what other dimension of reality do we come at our birth? And to what other dimension do we go when we die? Even more extraordinary is the fact that science, until very recently, has ignored the existence of the huge amount of material gathered over the past hundred or so years by institutions devoted to recording non-ordinary experiences: near-death, after-death and out-of-the-body experiences (NDE, ADE and OBE’s), as well as communications to the living from the “dead.” Nor has it accepted as worthy of scientific attention the shamanic experiences of visionaries and mystics of all cultures and times that have testified to the existence of other dimensions of reality and the possibility of a direct relationship with them.
            As long as science insists that the universe is impersonal and “dead” and without purpose or intention and that the physical brain is the sole source of consciousness, these beliefs will continue to cripple and constrict the human spirit and limit the horizon of our sight. As long as it continues to believe with Bertrand Russell that “No fire, nor heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave,” it will continue to block the growth of human understanding and stifle the longing of the human heart. Christopher Bache comments on this situation in his book Dark Night, Early Dawn:

Western thought has committed itself to a vision of reality that is based almost entirely on the daylight world of ordinary states of consciousness while systematically ignoring the knowledge that can be gained from the night-time sky of non-ordinary states…Trapped within the horizon of the near-at-hand, our culture creates myths about the unreliability and irrelevance of non-ordinary states. Meanwhile, our social fragmentation continues to deepen, reflecting in part our inability to answer the most basic existential questions.(1)

           This restricted vision of reality has left an aching void in many people's lives that neither religious belief, nor scientific progress, nor improving the material circumstances of our lives can fill, although these categories of knowledge are presented as offering all that is necessary to ameliorate the suffering of the human condition. What is missing is a sense of our intimate and joyous interaction with an invisible dimension, knowledge of how the relationship with this dimension can be cultivated, and how fear can ultimately be replaced by trust. There have been many great teachers—astronauts of the soul—who have pointed the way to a direct experience of reality but their message and their teachings have, for the most part, been misinterpreted or ignored. Rigid beliefs and their dark companion, fanaticism, have become a substitute for that mysterious relationship.
           Yet we could awaken to awareness of something that was once instinctively known and has long been forgotten—an understanding that we participate in and are contained by the creative consciousness and loving intelligence of the universe. Whatever name we give this consciousness - God, Universal Mind or Intelligence, Cosmic Soul, Energy or Spirit - does not really matter. What matters is that we recognize the existence of a dimension of reality beyond the one we know and enter into a relationship with it.
           The neglect of a vitally significant field of human experience has meant that the experiences and discoveries related to this field are considered to be irrelevant or, worse, symptoms of deluded and ‘superstitious’ minds. We no longer have access to other levels or modes of consciousness because our ‘rational’ mind has, over the last four centuries, increasingly ridiculed, disparaged and repressed what it has been unable, so far, to accept, prove or comprehend. It has, therefore, cut us off from those deeper instinctive aspects of our nature that have the power to connect us with other dimensions of reality. Access to those deeper-dwelling faculties has been denied for centuries and has led to them becoming atrophied for want of use. From the denial and repression of these intuitive, creative and imaginative aspects of ourselves has come our secular belief system and a culture of escalating violence which now threatens us with the disintegration of civilization and, ultimately, with the possible extinction of our species.
           William James' carefully chosen words, written a hundred years ago, seem more relevant than ever today:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.(2)

           Our understanding of life and the interconnectedness of all aspects of it is now tragically deficient. However, the growing pressure of current experiential evidence—most importantly in the field of transpersonal psychology and psychedelic research, but also in the work of scientists at the cutting edge of physics and cosmology—suggests that we are poised at the threshold of a breakthrough, a revelation in our understanding of the nature of reality. It may be that the finality of death is the greatest of our illusions. It may be that, with death, we awaken from the dream of life. Sogyal Rinpoche writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

All the greatest spiritual traditions of the world, including of course Christianity, have told us clearly that death is not the end. They have all handed down a vision of some sort of life to come, which infuses this life that we are leading now with sacred meaning. But despite their teachings, modern society is largely a spiritual desert where the majority imagine that this life is all that there is. Without any real or authentic faith in an afterlife, most people live lives deprived of any ultimate meaning.”(3)

            And, he continues,

I have come to realize that the disastrous effects of the denial of death go far beyond the individual: They affect the whole planet. Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern people have developed no long-term vision. So there is nothing to restrain them from plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that could prove fatal for the future. (4)

           Long ago, in Stone Age cultures of the world, people believed that the soul, at death, entered the Milky Way as the passageway to another world from which it would be reborn. The constellation of Cygnus – the Swan – was believed by many to be the destination for the souls of the ‘dead’. In all cultures, even our own modern secular one, the belief in immortality is deeply, instinctively present in the human soul. It may be that this belief has its far distant origins in the observation of the moon and its cyclical process of death and regeneration. The greatest myths from the ancient world – those of Sumer, Egypt and Greece, as well as the Christian myth of the death and resurrection of Jesus - all offer the lunar imagery of rebirth after the three days of darkness.
           When my mother died, I instinctively put a rose into her coffin as a symbol of my love for her and the continuity of my relationship with her. Several years later I was amazed to hear a medium say that my mother had been very touched by my gesture of farewell. Her words did not really surprise me but confirmed what I already felt to be true—that consciousness in some form survives death.
           While working on the last chapter of The Myth of the Goddess with Jules Cashford, we came across these deeply reflective words of the poet Rilke which enlarge the boundaries of our limited vision:

Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both…The true figure of life extends through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the ‘angels’, are at home…We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it…we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us…(5)

           I know that for many people in their later years the inevitability of death weighs like a stone on their hearts, yet they cannot share their grief and apprehension with their children or friends because there is a reluctance to talk about such matters. Even though death is an experience that awaits each one of us it is still deeply threatening to us. In a culture which believes that consciousness originates in the brain and that the death of the brain must inevitably bring about the extinction of consciousness, the subject of our survival beyond the death of the body rarely comes up for discussion. And so the deeper concerns of the heart are unable to find a channel of expression.
           Every day millions all over the world die, yet in our Western society the dead body of a relative does not usually stay in the house for more than a few hours. It is no longer part of the ritual of death to sit with the body or have relatives and friends come to say goodbye to the deceased and put flowers in the coffin. Children very rarely see the body of a grandparent or a parent and are shielded from the reality of what a dead body looks like. Many people are cremated rather than buried. That particular ceremony seems almost surreal because it ends abruptly after an allotted number of minutes in order to make room for the next group of mourners coming to say goodbye to a loved one. While there may be mention of eternal life, a return to God and similar time-honoured and reassuring ideas at a funeral or a cremation, people are given no idea of what the afterlife might be like, or what the passage from this life to another might entail, or of how to prepare for this experience.
           In view of the fact that death has always been part of the human condition and comes to us all, sooner or later, it seems strange that something of the greatest significance to people is given so little attention. However, as Jung pointed out in his autobiography,

Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is…a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible. (6)

           Thanks to my own out-of-the-body experience, and the direction my life took in response to that and to the early messages channeled by my mother and her friends, I have gathered together over the years the testimony of many individuals who have spoken of their out-of-the-body experiences and how these have changed their lives. Although I have enormous respect for science as a methodology, I do not accept the reductionist belief that the brain is the origin of consciousness because it seems implausible in the light of what I and many others have experienced, as well as what the philosophers, visionaries, mystics and shamans of cultures past and present have discovered.
           The variety of human experience is so rich, extensive and fascinating that I feel it is essential to include subjective experience in any consideration of what is of greatest value to us. And what could be of greater value than to know that consciousness survives the death of the body and what actually happens to us when we die? Those who do not know what it feels like to leave the body and retain conscious awareness of their separation from it are surely not qualified to dismiss such an experience as an illusion, or to affirm that it could only reflect a brain state generated by schizophrenia, epilepsy, a deteriorating nervous system or acute anxiety at the approach of death. To put this kind of label on an experience which is not yet explained by science suggests a monotheistic cast of mind which insists, as Richard Dawkins does, that only one view—the atheist view of reality—is ‘true’. I much prefer Rilke’s vision which recognizes the fundamental unity of both the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ and does not see us confined to a time-bound world. In this chapter I am not attempting to argue the authenticity of the belief in our survival, nor to provide scientific or medical proof of it, but simply to offer the testimony of certain individuals and their beliefs because I find them relevant to a wider comprehension of the soul.
           So many millions of people today are losing their lives prematurely, not only through the barbarity of war but through the devastating scourges of diseases such as AIDS and cancer. For this reason there seems to be an ever-greater urgency to explore the question of whether our consciousness survives death. The brutal intrusion of the sudden death of a loved one into so many people’s lives, and the anguish of their deep grieving, creates a pressure to discover more about the fate of those so abruptly banished from this dimension. The loss of life in Iraq, both soldiers and civilians, comes to mind but there are other areas of conflict in the world of today where sudden death is a shocking reality. There is also the sudden loss of life in an earthquake as in the recent terrible one in China. In addition, in the poorer parts of the world, there is the loss to parents of children who die of starvation, regional conflicts and water-born disease and, for millions of children, the loss of parents who have died from AIDS, leaving them to fend for themselves. If we knew more about what happens after death, it might not lessen the pain of the loss of a loved one, but it could take away the image of death as it is presently defined and allow people to trust that those closest and dearest to them are not lost to them forever. This trust is particularly vital in the lives of children, whose grief at being abandoned can develop later on into uncontrollable rage.
           I wonder whether the violence that is so endemic in humanity could be born not only from the experience of calamitous loss but also from the unconscious fear of death and the anger arising from the fact that we know so little about the deeper purpose of our presence on this planet and believe that we have only one life to live here. It may be that the killing of the ‘enemy’ in war, for example, is a surrogate sacrifice that unconsciously enhances our own capacity for survival.            Yet what would be the point of rejoicing in the killing of others if we knew that our bodies were only a temporary casing for an immortal consciousness? What would be the point of the huge engine of destruction that centuries of warfare have brought into being with the aim of destroying the body? Would we not realize that all our efforts to conquer, control and kill others in order to protect our own tribal group are a waste of resources, energy and precious life?
           Moreover, to be confined to only a brief span of life on this planet may give rise to the desperate drive to pack as much experience into this one life as possible and to struggle to accumulate wealth, power, prestige and sexual experience as a compensation to the limited time we have to live.
           It seems tragic that so much fear, loss, grief and pain may derive from the image we have of death. This image, transmitted through different cultures, is hardly ever questioned or discussed. For centuries, Christians were taught to believe that death was a punishment introduced into the world through the sin of the Fall, and that Christ’s redemptive death on the cross had broken the power of death and given us access to the resurrection—provided we were baptised as Christians. To rise again in a physical body (not a spiritual body) at the Day of Judgement, according to the doctrine, we need to have been baptized, to belong to the Christian faith. Not to have been baptized condemned the non-believer and, until very recently, even the unbaptized infant, to limbo. The atheist, of course, believes that death is the final end. He has only this one life and nothing beyond it. No modern belief system, as far as I am aware, apart from that of Tibetan Buddhism and certain shamanic cultures, prepares us for the actual experience of death or describes what life on the other side of death might be like.
           Unsurprisingly, in view of this strange silence, the greatest sorrow, the greatest fear we can experience in our lives is the loss of a beloved parent, child or companion, believing either that he or she may be lost to us forever or that reunion with them is uncertain. Despite my trust in survival and the certainty that this life is not my only one, the awareness of death evokes deep anxiety and sorrow in me. Sooner or later I, like everyone else in the world, will experience the loss of a loved one and, eventually, my own death and the parting from my husband, daughter and grandson.
           Whether it is our own death or the death of someone close to us, we may be deeply distressed by the fact that when so much passion and effort, suffering and love have been expended in living, everything we have built up, everything we have loved and cherished in our own lives or in those we love, has to be relinquished, often without preparation. Moreover, all that rich experience is, so to speak, gone forever, vanishing without trace in a moment. Many people who have lost loved ones may be left with deep feelings of grief, guilt and anger as well as regret over “unfinished business” with the departed that may affect them for the rest of their lives. Moreover, because of the identification of consciousness with the life of the body, there are also the body’s feelings of distress at death, its fear of dissolution and abandonment.
           What do people say to children when a parent has died? Do they tell them, as I heard one nurse tell a little girl whose mother had just died in hospital, that she could imagine that her mother had been flushed down the toilet and that she would never see her again? Or do we tell them that their mother is being looked after by the angels or by her parents, that she is still close to them and that when they die, she will come to meet them? What we tell them is important for our words have the power to nourish or destroy a child’s trust in life.
           There is also the problem of suicide, which leaves parents or children with deep feelings of guilt. My brother, whose son killed himself at the age of twenty-eight, carried a heavy burden of guilt until, several years later, he visited a medium. His son told him via the medium to let go of his feelings of guilt. He was far happier where he was than struggling to survive in the world, crippled as he had been by an addiction to cocaine and the resultant onset of schizophrenia. Details he gave which the medium could not have known convinced my brother that this was a genuine message from his son.
           What do we take with us as we approach the threshold of death? Surely the quintessence of our being: the love and energy we have poured into life, the love of children and grandchildren to whom we have given life, the love of the people we have cherished and who have cherished us, the creative work whose residue we leave behind us—part seen, part unseen—because no-one can express the full range of his or her being nor can those closest to us know the extent of it.

Past Beliefs about Life after Death
           Until the scientific revolution of the last four hundred years, people all over the world had a strong sense of connection with a dimension of reality beyond this material one. Within Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism there was (and still is) a belief in the existence of angels or spiritual beings who intervene to help and guide humanity, and there was and still is a belief that the soul survives the death of the physical body. Strangely, however, with the exception of Tibetan Buddhism, there seems to be a reluctance to gather evidence for what might happen to us after our death.
           If, however, we look back as far as Bronze Age Egypt, we find a highly developed and comprehensive cosmology and a detailed concept of the survival of the soul after death. Far from seeing death as extinction, the Egyptians compared the experience of death to an awakening to cosmic life and a return to the starry world of the cosmos and the “Blessed Fields of Ra.” As Jeremy Naydler tells us in his book Shamanism in Ancient Egypt, the divine element of the human being was called the akh or “shining spirit”. “It was associated by the Egyptians both with the sun and the stars, for its mode of existence is cosmic. The Egyptian Book of the Dead was an account of the practice of dying, and one of the most important teachings it contains has to do with the separability of the soul.” (7) (Temenos 2006)

Priest in the mask of Anubis preparing the deceased for the afterlife

           One of the oldest images of the soul’s survival comes from Crete, engraved on a beautiful gold seal ring called the Ring of Nestor, found in a beehive tomb at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnese and dated to c. 1500 BC. It shows a young deceased couple seated on a branch of a great tree. Above their heads are two small chrysalises and, hovering near these, two butterflies.

Cretan Seal from Pylos

           It is said that in ancient Greece, the secret rituals of the Mysteries celebrated at Eleusis and believed to have lasted for a thousand years, gave initiates the certainty of immortality. Etruscan wall paintings dating to 690 BC have recently been discovered that show migrating birds which are believed to symbolize the souls of the dead as they journeyed from one ‘home’ to another. Instead of building on these earlier beliefs about the survival of the soul, modern secular culture, influenced first by Christianity which dismissed these pagan beliefs, and now by scientific reductionism, has seen them as superstitions that we have thankfully outgrown. Modern culture appears to have lost trust in the continuity of life after death and the living relationship that many earlier cultures had with the ancestral dead.

The Survival of the Soul
           Long ago in 8th century Tibet, a great Buddhist Tantric master called Padma-Sambhava who brought Buddhism to Tibet gave out a teaching on the after-death experience to his closest disciples and the ruler of Tibet. At his request, the text of this teaching was to remain concealed in one of Tibet’s sacred mountains, there to await the appointed time when it was appropriate for it to be found and made available to a wider world. An era of persecution followed but in the fifteenth century, the text of Padma-Sambhava’s teaching was found and news of it carried far and wide through the mountainous regions adjoining Tibet. Early in the last century, two great scholars, W.Y. Evans-Wentz and the Lama Anagarika Govinda, translated one chapter of it into English and this translation was first published in 1927 as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The third edition of this translation was published in 1957 by Oxford University Press with a commentary by C.G. Jung. Now, for the first time, Penguin has published the entire text of twelve chapters or sections in a new translation called The Tibetan Book of the Dead, with an introduction and commentary by his Holiness the Dalai Lama. (2005)
          It seems that the ground has been prepared for the Tibetan teaching, however difficult to understand. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a growing number of people have become convinced through their own subjective experience and through reading the many books on the subject that consciousness continues beyond the death of the body. Those who have been unexpectedly precipitated into a near-death experience and returned to their bodies have found that it has given them a new perspective on life. They now live life in a different way, with less fear of death and a greater sense of responsibility for their actions. Others have recorded out-of-the-body experiences (OBE’s) and also their being in touch with deceased loved ones.

A Great Pioneer
           The greatest modern pioneer in opening up the subject of life after death for Western culture as a whole was the late Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Like the stunning impact of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962, which opened our awareness to ecological concerns, the publication of her book On Death and Dying in 1969 tore away the opaque veil that had shrouded the subject of death. (8) Almost single-handedly, helped by her strong personality as well as her extensive clinical experience as a doctor and psychiatrist, she broke through the taboo on the subject of death and transformed attitudes towards death and the care of the dying. Her later books, particularly On Life After Death (1991), kept the subject before the eyes of the public and, thanks to the rapid dissemination of her ideas through the media as well as many workshops in different countries, led to many thousands, if not millions, having a greater trust in their own and their loved ones’ survival after death. (9) Her writing also led to far better care of the dying and respect for their needs.
           Her experience of caring for her dying patients taught her that many of them had NDE’s and OBE’s which gave them trust in their survival beyond the death of their body. Increasingly fascinated by this subject, she gathered together the case-histories of over twenty thousand people from all over the world and from every cultural and social background who had returned to life after being declared clinically dead. Some had returned to life naturally and some through the rapidly developing skills of medical reanimation. Drawing on the same imagery as the Cretan Seal of 1500 BC, she compared the death of the physical body to the shedding of a worn-out casing or cocoon, releasing the “butterfly” of the soul into life in another dimension.
            These thousands of testimonies convinced her that there was no such thing as death—that it was an experience of transition to another state of consciousness “where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.”(10) It seemed to her that it was nothing short of a tragedy that so many millions were not aware of this and she realised that, after her many years of work as a psychiatrist with schizophrenic patients, and many more years of work caring for the dying, she needed most of all to communicate to people the fact that death was not the end of consciousness. “The dying experience is almost identical to the experience at birth. It is birth into a different existence which can be proven quite simply. For thousands of years you were made to “believe” in the things concerning the beyond. But for me it is no longer a matter of belief, but rather a matter of knowing.”(11) Through the many years of her work, she, like others who followed her, was able precisely to define what happens as we move from this dimension into another.
           She described how the first stage of the near-death experience begins with a feeling of serenity and calm, even feelings of joy and bliss. A person may become aware that he or she is leaving the body, floating above it and with the unfamiliar ability to move around in the room and look down on the body, often from the ceiling.

As soon as your soul leaves the body, you will immediately realize that you can perceive everything that is happening at the place of dying, be it in a hospital room, at the site of an accident or wherever you left your body. You do not register these events with your earthly consciousness, but rather with a new awareness, even during the time your body has no blood pressure, no pulse, no breathing, and in some cases, no measurable brain waves. (12)

           She found that people gave clear descriptions of what they saw happening to them during surgery, or cardiac resuscitation, or when being cut free from a car after an accident, even to such details as the license plate on the car that hit them. They could hear the words of the doctors and nurses working on their shattered bodies and could repeat these to the astonished and often sceptical helpers. A special study of blind people that she conducted showed that they were able to see and remember the colors, jewellery, clothes and even the patterns on the clothes of the people engaged in resuscitating them.
           In the second stage of the NDE, the ‘dead’ person who previously had been seriously injured, or perhaps blind or deaf in their earthly life, realizes that they are restored to perfect wholeness and health. Those formerly blind and deaf report that during their NDE, they can see and hear. Even patients who had multiple sclerosis and were confined to a wheel-chair reported that during their NDE they were able to move again, even to dance and sing. A person might be fully aware that he or she had lost a limb in an accident, but in the NDE he or she sees that limb rejoined to the body. This experience would seem to reflect the words in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, “Even though you may have been blind, deaf or lame while you were alive, now your eyes see forms, your ears hear sounds and all your sense faculties are faultless, clear and complete.”(13) While the Tibetan words refer to the person who is actually dead rather than to one who is undergoing a near-death experience, the similarity between them is striking.
           Kübler-Ross found that children who were close to death moved in and out of an NDE state as the time of their death drew nearer. They said that a grandparent or other close relative on the other side was there to reassure them and help them with the transition. As her work gathering the thousands of experiences of NDE’s developed, she found that no-one who had one of these experiences was any longer afraid of dying. Many indeed wanted to return to that out-of-the-body state where they experienced themselves as healed and whole again. Since the care of dying children was her special concern, she sat with many who had been brought to hospital after car accidents. She found that as she sat watching for the signs of serenity immediately preceding death, a child might say that everything was all right and that their loved ones were waiting for them. In one example she shared, a child told her that her mother and brother were waiting for her—even though no one had told her that her mother and brother had been killed in the same accident.
           Another case that Kübler-Ross mentions describes how a Native American woman died in the arms of a stranger shortly after a hit-and-run accident, saying as she passed that he should give a message to her mother that she was happy because she was with her dad. The stranger was so moved by this experience that he drove seven hundred miles to see the woman’s mother on an Indian reservation. There he was told that her husband, father of the victim, had died of a coronary one hour before his daughter’s accident.(14) There were many cases like this where the dying person had not known of the prior death of another member of the family, yet was greeted by them.
           The third stage of the NDE—which can sometimes anticipate the awareness of the physical body being separate from the observing body—is the experience of moving very rapidly through a tunnel or cylinder-like funnel, often accompanied by a loud roaring noise as of a rushing wind, avalanche or waterfall. This is the experience that I myself had when I was eleven and I remember the loud roaring noise as being terrifying because I did not know what was happening to me. If I had known then what I know now, it would have greatly diminished my fear. As they move through the tunnel, many people describe seeing a light at the end of it which grows brighter as they advance through it until they find themselves bathed in its indescribably brilliant radiance.
           Near the end of her book On Life After Death, Dr. Kübler-Ross describes her own experience of the light and love of the divine ground:

It started with a very fast vibration, or pulsation, of my abdominal area which spread through my entire body and then to anything that my eyes could see – the ceiling, the horizons outside of my window, the trees, and eventually the whole planet earth. It was as if the whole planet was in a very high speed vibration, every molecule vibrated. At the same time, something that looked like a lotus flower bud appeared and opened into an incredible, beautiful, colorful flower. Behind the lotus flower appeared the light that my patients so often talk about. And as I approached this light through the open lotus flower, with a whirl in a deep, fast vibration, I gradually and slowly merged into this incredible unconditional love, into this light. I became one with it.  (15)

           Later she describes how soon afterwards, as she went out of her house, she experienced “the greatest ecstasy of existence that human beings can ever experience on this physical plane. I was in total love and awe of all life around me. I was in love with every leaf, every cloud, every piece of grass, every living creature.” There was, she says, “no questioning the validity of this experience, it was simply an awareness of a cosmic consciousness of life in every living thing, and of a love that can never ever be described in words.” (16)
           Elisabeth Kübler-Ross laid the foundation for a new approach to the experience of dying, one that is based on trust and that presents the invisible dimension of the cosmos as loving and caring for the lives of those who are about to leave this dimension. There is a gentleness, a true feminine compassion, an empathy in her books that is something new. There is also the fierce passionate strength needed to bring her vision through into a culture which denies death and treats old people with shocking indifference.
           Traditionally women have been the ones who care for the dying just as they care for the new-born. However, in the past, all the pronouncements on the nature of death and the survival of the soul from whatever religious tradition have been formulated by men. Here, suddenly, is a woman’s perspective on death, a woman’s trust in the survival of the soul. We are being offered an opportunity to create a new vision of reality, a new enlightened and compassionate approach to death that could take humanity forward, into a different understanding of both life and death.

A New Perspective on Death and Dying
           There have been other books (see appendix for list) which have opened up this field of our experience. I vividly remember the impact of Raymond Moody’s two books, Life after Life (1975) and Reflections on Life after Life (1978) which, like Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s books, aroused an enormous increase of interest in the possibility of life after death. In 1973 Robert Monroe founded the Monroe Institute America to study out-of-body experiences and wrote Journeys Out of the Body. In 1980, Kenneth Ring, Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, published his book, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience, and followed this up with the founding of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, dedicated to the exploration of near-death experiences and encouraging their investigation at an international level. His later books, among them Heading Towards Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (1984) and Lessons from the Light (2000), gave further detailed accounts of an experience that must have long been familiar to people in shamanic cultures but had, until very recently, not been discussed in our own.
            In 2005, a book by Professor David Fontana—called Is there an Afterlife?—minutely documented and summarized the history of research into survival after death. (17) Commenting on it, Dr. Peter Fenwick, who, with his wife, has recently published The Art of Dying, writes, “After reading it and assessing the evidence, there can no longer be any doubt that there is life after death.”(18) Apart from these seminal books, there were many others published over these thirty years by individuals recording their own personal experience. (Mention Mellon Thomas Benedict’s experience)

What We Can Learn from These Books
           This material, documenting the recorded testimonies of tens of thousands of near-death and out-of-the body experiences, as well as the evidence gathered through organizations such as the Alister Hardy Research Centre in Oxford, have begun to change our understanding of what lies beyond the transitional experience that we call death. What is most striking about these experiences is their vivid, precise imagery and the intensity of the emotions generated by them, as well their capacity to change people’s perspective on their daily lives, giving them a sense that their lives hold a much deeper meaning. It is possible that through thousands of people all over the world having NDE, OBE and ADE (after-death) experiences and recording them for others, our lost tradition of shamanic journeying practiced by lunar cultures as an initiation into other dimensions of reality, is being recovered.
           In contrast to this expansion of consciousness, there is the ongoing attempt by scientists to prove that these experiences are “all in the mind”. Experiments have been reported and published in the journal Science (2007) where scientists have recreated OBE’s in the laboratory. From this they conclude that these are nothing more than illusion or “tricks of the mind”. So insistent are scientists like Dr. Susan Blackmore, who teaches at a university in the United Kingdom, that OBE’s are “all in the brain” that she can unequivocally state, “Out-of-the-body experiences should be understood not as evidence for the supernatural, but as a fascinating experience that potentially we can all have.” But these scientists cannot so far explain the kind of experiences Kübler-Ross recounts.
           Despite this ‘rational’ approach, there now exists a kind of sub-culture formed of thousands of people who have a hunger to know more about these experiences. This hunger would seem to reflect the soul’s need for a deeper insight into the meaning of our lives and the creation of a relationship with other dimensions of reality and with loved ones who have left this world. Belief for these people is not enough: they want to know and they want to connect. Many thousands of people in indigenous cultures still do routinely connect with their ancestors. They consider it perfectly normal and, indeed, necessary to build ongoing relationships with them for the benefit of the particular group to which they belong and to align the life of the community with the deeper life of the invisible world. It is only in ‘rational’ cultures that this connection is ridiculed or dismissed. Here is one experience recounted to me by a woman who has practised shamanic visualization:

I have been involved in a formal shamanic training for almost two years and as one of our exercises we journeyed to the moment following our death. I won't go into detail about all that I saw on the other side, but I will say that I came back with a radically different feeling about life on this earth. I did see something of what you describe, the idea that this world is embedded within a vast matrix of cosmic life. One image – metaphor - that I received was of myself standing in a still center before rebirth while around me turned, like a great carrousel, “entrances” to world after world, dimension after dimension, planet after planet. They were all there and could be accessed at the proper time. For all I know, the possibilities are infinite. During that meditation/vision I saw more clearly than I have ever seen that this is not a flawed, “inferior” world, as Christianity teaches. We already exist in paradise, if only we had eyes to see it—the beauty of this world is immense and dazzling. I realized that in all my best moments, especially in the natural world—near the ocean, on the mountaintop among the redwoods, in the fields and woods of my childhood—I have felt that oneness, that wholeness, that ecstasy of belonging, that sense of immortality and the eternal, that understanding that all is well at the foundation of the world. I recognized that feeling as I looked through the entrances that led to the borders of all these worlds.” (19)

           Many NDE testimonies describe a “being of light” who comes to meet them and who is experienced as loving and embracing them—almost the quintessence of love itself. This is a deeply emotional experience, the memory of which stays with them on their return to their earthly life. Others are met by a close family relative, already deceased or by a dear friend who welcomes and reassures them.
           A further feature of the NDE is witnessing a life-review, often shown to them by the being of light and experienced ‘in a flash’ even though the review includes minute details of the experiences, relationships, thoughts and emotions of many years of earth life. They are made aware of all the things they have said and done that have affected others in both a positive and negative sense. Their experience suggests that every thought, every word we utter is somehow recorded and also that events that we experience here, as it were in slow motion, are speeded up in that other dimension. Also our capacity to view these events and assimilate them is apparently accelerated there.
           What is so interesting about this particular feature of the modern near-death experience is that it reflects a similar experience in Egyptian times, which gave the Egyptians the mythic image of Osiris as the Judge of the Dead and Weigher of the Soul in the scales of the goddess Maat. The Egyptian Book of the Dead shows the soul of the deceased passing through the Hall of Judgement to be “weighed” before it passes on to the “Fields of Ra” or the starry world. The same image is shown in the right-hand bottom quadrant of the Cretan Seal.
           To live one’s life in the awareness that we not only survive death but that every thought, every nuance of relationship, is recorded in a deeper dimension of being which will be played back to us in a life review, gives a far greater awareness of our responsibility for how we conduct ourselves in our relationships with others and how far-reaching our words and actions are in affecting the lives and well-being of others.
           Naturally, people who have been critically injured want to stay in this strange new environment which is often described as being exquisitely beautiful. However, if their destiny is to return to earth life, they come up against some kind of barrier, such as a fence or a door, or they encounter someone, sometimes a deceased family member or perhaps a being of light, who gives them reasons why they need to go back to care for their family or to complete their work on earth. Regretfully, they accept this, although sometimes not without protest, and soon find themselves back in their physical body, not knowing quite how they returned to it.
           As to what the feeling of passing from one dimension to another is like, there is an interesting description in a book called On Death and Dying by Jung's closest colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz. She writes:

All the dreams of people who are facing death indicate the unconscious, that is, our instinct world, prepares consciousness not for a definite end but for a profound transformation and for a kind of continuation of the life process which, however, is unimaginable to everyday consciousness...The image of light appears more often than any other image in our quoted material. Jung has expressed the assumption that psychic reality might lie on a supraluminous level of frequency, that is, it could exceed the speed of light.(20)

           One of the interesting accounts she cites is that of a man who was thought to have been clinically dead for twenty-three minutes:

I was moving very quickly toward a bright shining net which vibrated with a remarkable cold energy at the intersection points of its radiant strands. The net was like a lattice which I did not want to break through. For a brief moment my forward movement seemed to slow down, but then I was in the lattice. As I came in touch with it, the light flickering increased to such an intensity that it consumed and, at the same time, transformed me. I felt no pain. The feeling was neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but it filled me completely. From then on everything was different—this can be described only very incompletely. The whole thing was like a transformer, an energy-transformer, which transported me into a formlessness beyond time and space. I was not in another place—for spatial dimensions had been abolished—but rather in another state of being. (21)

            Here is another observation she cites, that of an architect named Stefan von Jankovich:

One of the greatest discoveries I made during death...was the oscillation principle...Since that time “God” represents, for me, a source of primal energy, inexhaustible and timeless, continually radiating energy, absorbing energy and constantly pulsating...Different worlds are formed from different oscillations; the frequencies determine the differences...Therefore it is possible for different worlds to exist simultaneously in the same place, since the oscillations that do not correspond with each other also do not influence themselves...Thus birth and death can be understood as events in which, from one oscillation frequency and therefore from one world, we come into another. (22)

After-Death Experiences (ADE’s)
           Many bereaved people have had the experience of seeing their loved ones appearing to them or communicating with them in some way after their death. Others feel a very strong presence of that person in their lives, as if they were still close to them, even close enough to have a dialogue with them. They can feel the presence of the other even if they cannot see them with their physical eyes. Some people have vivid dreams of the deceased person. While this may be considered an unusual event in our culture, probably because there is no way it can be shared with a wider public, in indigenous ones, it is an entirely normal experience.
           In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes a dream he had of his wife shortly after her death:

I saw her in a dream which was like a vision. She stood at some distance from me, looking at me squarely. She was in her prime, perhaps about thirty, and wearing the dress which had been made for her many years before…perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever worn. Her expression was neither joyful nor sad, but, rather, objectively wise and understanding, without the slightest emotional reaction, as though she were beyond the mist of affects. I knew that it was not she, but a portrait she had made or commissioned for me. It contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three years of marriage, and the end of her life also. Face to face with such wholeness one remains speechless, for it can scarcely be comprehended. (23)

           I wonder whether our world and the worlds or dimensions we cannot see exist as levels in the vast vibrational field of cosmic soul where each level is vibrating at a different rate; so the world of the “living dead” moves at a different vibratory rate than the “physical matter” of our world. Occasionally, in some way we don’t yet understand, these different levels come close to or overlap with each other, or perhaps our field of consciousness expands so that we have a glimpse, a brief connection, before we are returned to our usual state. In a talk he gave on Angels, the artist the late Cecil Collins said, “Perhaps there are not two things, spirit and matter …but different degrees of one reality: different degrees of vibrations on a scale from the lower end of vibrations we call matter to the higher, the vibration and radiance of the world of light which is the world of angels. We see according to our place on the scale of vibrations.” (24)

The Subtle Body
           One of the most important questions that arises from these experiences is the nature of the vehicle of consciousness after the death of the body. In 1919 G.R.S. Mead, translator of major works of Egyptian and Neo-Platonic philosophy and the then known Gnostic texts, published his Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition. (25) This revealed, as the introduction to a new edition published in 2005 says, that there is and always has been an esoteric tradition in the West, as well as in the East, concerning the “subtle body” of man. This would seem to correspond to what is generally referred to as the soul in the Christian tradition. But the concept of the soul as the subtle body we inhabit after death was never developed by Christian doctrine and offered to the culture as a whole, so the pre-existent teaching about the survival of consciousness after the death of the body derived from Egypt and, subsequently, the Platonic School in Athens and the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus was virtually lost.
           Mead writes of the subtle body: “Conjectures concerning it vary with every stage of culture and differ within every stage. But the underlying conception invariably holds its ground, and makes good its claim to be one of the most persistent persuasions of mankind in all ages and climes.”(26) Even in 1919, he could write in words that are as relevant for our day, nearly a hundred years later, as they were for his: “It is, however, the prevailing habit of the sceptical rationalism of the present day to dismiss summarily all such beliefs of antiquity as the baseless dreams of a pre-scientific age, and to dump them all indiscriminately into the midden of exploded superstitions. But this particular superstition, I venture to think, cannot be justly disposed of in so contemptuous a fashion.” (27)
           Mead was already anticipating the possibility that physicists would one day discover the existence of subtle energy fields and would therefore be able to prove the existence of the subtle body, using their own methodology.
           Many writers of earlier cultures speak variously of a “subtle” body, a “resurrection” body (St. Paul), a “celestial” body, a “shining” body, a “radiant” body and an “ethereal” or “starry” body. In the sixteenth century, an alchemist who goes by the unforgettable name of Ruland the Lexicographer, identifies the faculty of the imagination itself with the subtle body when he writes “Imagination is the star in man; the celestial and super-celestial body.” This “body” was thought by some to be located in some part of the physical body but was also described as something that surrounds or enfolds the physical body and acts as a vehicle for consciousness when it is incarnated in this earthly dimension. When we discard the body the “celestial body,” so to speak, comes into its own and we discover to our surprise that we are not dead but very much alive in a “new body.” As the great early Christian theologian, Origen (ca AD182-ca 251), pointed out, we do not need the same kind of body we have on earth as we no longer need to eat, excrete etc.
           This radiant celestial body can see and hear as before, only more intensely, more rapidly, and it gives us instantaneous access to the thoughts of others, as well as to places or people with whom we wish to communicate. It also gives the person access to the thoughts and emotions of people they knew while in this physical dimension. If people are harbouring negative thoughts about them, this can cause them great suffering, while, as Sogyal Rinpoche suggests, if they are sending them loving, healing thoughts, these can help them so there is a connection between the two planes. The life review, which moves from beginning to end with incredible speed, suggests that time is different or non-existent in this other dimension. The subtle body moves faster than thought to the place it wants to be and just as quickly to contact the people it wants to see. Other people’s thoughts and communications appear in one’s own consciousness. In relation to the clarity of vision and freedom of movement that characterises life in the subtle body, we are, in this physical dimension of reality, living a diminished existence, enclosed like an oyster in its shell, as Plato put it in his Phaedrus.
           One of the most beautiful descriptions of the subtle body is to be found in The Hymn of the Robe of Glory or Hymn of the Pearl as it is also known. Believed to have been written by a Gnostic called Bardasanes, who lived in Edessa in the third century AD, and originally translated by Mead, it tells the story of the soul taking leave of her father and mother in the heavenly realms, her descent into mortality, her lapse into forgetfulness of her divine origin, her awakening and seizure of a pearl from the jaws of a great dragon and her return to the source from which she came, where she is finally clothed in the “body of glory” and received into the Kingdom. The vibrant words of this extract from the poem describe the soul’s encounter with the innermost essence of the “body of light.”

My bright embroidered robe,
Which… with glorious colours;
With gold and with beryls,
And rubies and agates
And sardonyxes varied in colour…
And like the sapphire stone also were its manifold hues…
It hastened that I might take it
And me too my love urged on
That I should run to meet it and receive it;
And I stretched forth and received it,
With the beauty of its colours I adorned myself
And my toga of brilliant colours
I cast around me, in its whole breadth. (28)

The Moment of Death
           These beautiful lines written by the sixteenth century English poet John Donne in his poem “Hymn to God, My God” awaken deep reflection on the moment of transition when we move from this dimension into another:

Since I am coming to that holy roome
Where, with thy Quire of Saints, for evermore
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must doe then, think here before. (29)

           But how do we tune the instrument of our being to the music of the cosmos? Even the act of reflecting on this gentle metaphor of communion or reunion may help to quieten the turmoil of our thoughts, bring to mind what is most important to us, how we might refine our being. In the final hours and minutes of our lives, we may experience many strong feelings: fear and uncertainty about what is to come, regret about things we may have done or were not able to do, bitterness at the suffering we may have endured or caused, deep sadness that we were unable to do more, the longing to communicate all that we were unable to say to loved ones, and, above all, to express the love we felt and feel for them. It helps greatly if those feelings can be shared with someone who can spare the time to listen to us.
           Group Captain Leonard Cheshire V.C., founder of the Leonard Cheshire Homes, wrote these moving words in a pamphlet he published entitled “Death”:

To accompany a man on his final life’s steps as a companion and a friend, recognising that it is his special hour in which we are privileged to share, is to receive as much as it is to give. It is to become more fulfilled and mature, and almost certainly a little more sensitive to what is taking place in another person’s heart. It is to learn how truly our living and our dying are both part and parcel of the same process and how much easier it would all become if we could learn to talk about it during our lifetime as naturally and realistically as we do with life’s other main turning points. (30)

           Those who do quietly sit and listen, in empathic companionship, even when a person has lost consciousness, may become aware that just before the person dies, a deep feeling of peace and serenity pervades the room.
Often those who are dying may find themselves intensely alone and afraid at the moment when they are in the greatest need of comfort and support. If they have been wounded in battle or involved in a car accident, they may have been rushed to hospital and the Intensive Care Unit. Doctors and nurses may be busily engaged in trying to prolong the moments of their life when, sensing the approach of death, all they want is to be able to prepare for the moment of transition and to be listened to by another human being when, as Leonard Cheshire writes, “There takes place in the uttermost depth of our being a dialogue into which no one else on earth, even our closest partner, the sharer of all our other secrets, can enter.”
           In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche asks us to live our lives in awareness of this moment of death so that, when it comes, we are able to relinquish the pressing concerns of the personality and focus on reunion with the Source from which we come. This Source, in the Tibetan tradition, as in others, is conceived of as a great light—the light of the Void. Whatever effort we can make in our last moments to free ourselves from the powerful emotions that may have ruled our lives, will ease our transition from one level of reality to another. With death approaching it is important, where possible, to resolve old problems of relationship with others, to let go of old angers, jealousies, envies and fears, to be reconciled with people from whom we have become alienated, to speak lovingly and reassuringly to parents or children from whom we may be separated, to share our anxieties with a close friend or relative.

Euthanasia
           In this country many people have the dreadful experience of seeing their loved ones suffering from an incurable illness with the knowledge that neither they nor their doctors are permitted by law to help them to die, even though the person suffering is begging to be released from their body and ready to pass on to whatever they believe awaits them after death. Some thirty or so years ago, when there were still family doctors who knew the whole family well and who were often trusted friends, this was not a problem. Unfortunately, the reorganization of the NHS in the United Kingdom, together with the fall-out from the Shipman case, in which a GP, considered to be a highly respected doctor in the old-fashioned “family” sense, casually murdered dozens, possibly hundreds, of people he had decided were expendable, have made it very difficult for a doctor to “help” a patient over the threshold. Officially it is no longer possible.
           While the opposition to euthanasia is understandable because people might be tempted to dispose of an elderly spouse or relative for a variety of reasons, each individual case should, I feel, be assessed by the family of the person who wishes to die, together with a doctor's assessment of the patient's condition and the quality of life available to him or her. To make a blanket law, applicable to everyone, is possibly to protect society against the abuse of the freedom to make a choice between life and death, but it is also to act without compassion for the suffering of the individual and his or her family. It goes against the values of the heart. Some countries, notably Switzerland, Belgium and, to a lesser extent, the Netherlands, allow people the right to choose to end their lives. The organization Dignitas in Zurich is one place which receives people who have chosen to end their lives, although it is still against the law of the United Kingdom to help people to go there.

Reincarnation
           In a lunar culture, the idea that we have many lives, moving in and out of this physical dimension of reality, would have been thought of as perfectly natural, given the nature of the recurring cycles of the moon. I have long been convinced that we have many lives, fragments of which may return to us, some vividly and some as a faint memory—perhaps as a longing for a specific place or a strong attraction to someone who seems strangely familiar to us or, conversely, as fear or dislike of places or people we barely know. When I first went to India and came across the belief in reincarnation in both Hinduism and Buddhism, it never occurred to me to question it. I felt totally at home in India, at home in these religions so different from my own. Because of the breadth and depth of their concept of divinity, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita meant more to me than the Christian image of God I had grown up with. I found myself drawn to study the life and teaching of the Buddha and the wonderful images of him that had spread from India all across Asia to China and Japan.
           It seemed obvious to me that thousands of years of contemplation in traditions that were far older than Christianity needed to be respected and, moreover, the idea that we have many lives seemed so logical. One life was not nearly long enough to encompass all that was in me that wanted to live and experience, nor was it enough to learn all I wanted to know and to apply that knowledge to how I lived my own life, however it was to unfold. The idea that we only have one life was claustrophobic. The idea that we are continually reborn into this material dimension until we are able to recover the knowledge of our divine origin and begin consciously to relate to that source or ground made perfect sense.
            The teaching about the long-term karmic effects of my actions, carried over from life to life, made me more conscious of the need to act with greater awareness of how I was living and how I was treating other people. Although there were abuses - as for example when people do not try to relieve the suffering of others because they think they must have deserved it - the concept of karma seemed more compassionate as an explanation of suffering and release from suffering than the concept of original sin. There were so many questions that could never be answered if the framework was limited to one life. But if I widened it to embrace many lives, everything made more sense. There was more time to pause and reflect on things instead of packing every moment with frenetic activity, in case something was left out of my one and only life.
           In a recent book, Science and the Re-enchantment of the Cosmos (2006), Ervin Laszlo sums up the many cultures and peoples who have believed in reincarnation.

It has been an intrinsic part of myth, metaphysics, and philosophy for thousands of years. It is an essential element in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, and Taoism. It is present in the belief systems of African tribes, of Native Americans and pre-Columbian cultures, of the Hawaian kahunas, and of the Gauls and Druids. It was adopted by the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Karaites, and other Jewish tribes and groups; it remains an important element in the Kabbalah. In ancient Greece the Pythagorians and the Orphics subscribed to it. Plato spoke of “metempsychosis” (the transmigration of the psyche) in many of his famous dialogues – Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus – Julius Caesar mentioned it as a doctrine held by the Celts and Roman historians noted that it was shared by the Germanic people. (31)

           So how did it come to be lost in the West? Reincarnation was once part of Christian doctrine until it was removed at the time of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 AD when the Emperor Justinian anathematised the teachings of the great Christian teacher Origen about the pre-existence of the soul. Origen, described by Saint Gregory as “the Prince of Christian learning in the third century,” wrote: “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life.” It seems nothing short of tragic that the Emperor Justinian - who with his wife Theodora facing him stands clothed in magnificent robes in the apse of San Vitale in Ravenna - also closed down the 1000-year-old Platonic Academy in Athens in 529 AD, driving out its last teacher, Damascius. Through the decision of one powerful man, Christianity was deprived of a teaching that could have given it far greater depth and a more complete perspective on life, and the culture of the West was immeasurably impoverished by the loss for nearly a thousand years of the legacy of Platonic and Neo-Platonic teaching with all its rich insight into the nature of the soul. It was only re-introduced into Western civilization by Marsilio Ficino when Cosimo dei Medici commisioned him to translate the works of Plato.

Healing the Traumas of Past Lives
           Past-life Regression is a recently developed approach to a deep understanding of ourselves that confirms the fact that we each hold experience and memory of many other lives. Using this method of regression, we can access buried memories which are held over from life to life in the wider field of the soul. We can, for example, re-live and heal the trauma of a terrible death in another life whose memory, held at the unconscious level of the psyche, affects us in this one. It may even afflict us with bodily symptoms or disturbing emotional ones such as constant anxiety, obsessive fear or guilt. Roger Woolger is a Jungian analyst and a pioneer in this field. For the last two decades he has worked to develop past-life regression, calling it “Deep Memory Process.” As he writes in his most recent book, Healing Your Past Lives, this method “offers a set of tools for delving into the deep recesses of your unconscious mind—what we call the soul—to discover where memories of past existence are stored, and bring them to light…They can open to you the transcendent reality of the soul.”
            Studying with shamans and spiritual healers in South America, he learned from them that these deeply unconscious memories can be released and the psyche rebalanced and that we have many spiritual resources that are available to us from dimensions of reality beyond our own. In the course of his researches and his practise, it dawned on him that as he empathically accompanied his clients and students into their inner worlds, he was actually moving with them into another world that in many cultures has been called the “subtle world.” He discovered that by cultivating a specific form of imaginative awareness, a visionary capacity which is latent in us all can be developed.

This visionary capacity…is both the language of and the gateway to the soul, transcending time and space to let us access eternal realities only dimly known to our reasoning minds. It has always been available to visionaries, mystics and charismatics—and regarded by them as a sacred faculty—but for many people it lies dormant until it is awakened. (32)

           In his view, there are three “fields.” The first carries the memories of the physical traumas, including terrible deaths and diseases that were suffered in a former life or lives. The second is an emotional field which carries “the memories of all unresolved feeling states and emotional traumas from past lives, such as fear of physical violence, anger at injustice, depression about a hopeless situation, grief at deep loss, guilt at cruel behavior, shame from abuse or humiliation, or worthlessness from having failed in some way.” The third field or level of memories carries the memory of obsessive thoughts that arose from these unresolved or distressing situations. These thoughts may persist in this present life, carrying over a negative refrain from another one, thoughts such as “I‘m no good,” “I shall never be able to do this,” “Everybody is against me.” Often the refrain may reflect a deep conviction of guilt, arising from a situation in another life where one had perhaps to abandon a child or where one was responsible for the death of others, as in the context of war. Beyond these three fields, there is a vast field which holds the memories of the connections, whether positive or negative that we had with people who were close to us in another life. If, for example, we were responsible for the death of other people, perhaps ordering their execution or the wholesale slaughter of thousands, the spirits of those people, still carrying their unresolved pain and anger, may remain attached to us. This is a sobering thought which those planning to use WMD might contemplate.
           These physical, emotional and mental memories and negative refrains from other lives can affect our present life, inhibiting our ability to respond to life’s difficulties and challenges in a positive way. I don’t think there has been a study apart from Roger Woolger’s many case histories which connects severe depression in this life with the memory of trauma carried through from another one. Nor is there one showing how a person may repeat the negative patterns of a previous life by being drawn to situations or people which may re-constellate the original trauma. As for healing all this trauma, many are involved in helping to release the spirits of those still bound to this dimension by their suffering, particularly the spirits of soldiers killed in war. One of the most effective ways of helping those we have lost is to imagine them bathed in light, healed and whole and free of pain and distress. The pioneering work of Edith Fiore as explained in her book, The Unquiet Dead, is of particular note in this connection (33) as is the work of the Jungian analyst, Edward Tick, working with war veterans as well as the souls of the dead, described in his book, War and the Soul. (34)
           There is so much that is still to be discovered. What we perceive as visible reality is only a fraction of the whole. A vast amount of the spectrum of reality is still invisible and unknown to us. Now, amazingly, digital technology is able to show us “orbs of light” which unexpectedly appear on digital photographs, suggesting phenomena are appearing here which come from another dimension of reality. (35)
           A few years ago, a manuscript came into my hands called The Miracle of Death. I wrote a Foreword to it because I felt it could help many bereaved people to trust in the survival of their loved ones. Betty Kovács, the author, who lost first a son and then a husband in car accidents two and a half years apart, describes how, out of a sustained meditative attention, there was born in her not only a deeper capacity for insight but the opening of her awareness “to a dimension so vast that I was stunned to realize how excruciatingly small a space I had been trained to live in and call reality.” What she experienced as her awareness of this dimension expanded was the shattering of the myth of materialism which condemns so many to a meaningless life of “mediocrity, addiction, violence, indifference and fanaticism.” The message of her book is one of hope and trust that we will be able to open ourselves to the experience of the mysteries of the universe and weave these mysteries into our daily lives, and by doing so healing the deep fragmentation in our souls. On the last page of her book she writes, “As we reconnect, full circle, to the roots of our existence in the Mind of the universe,… We understand that ‘Death is as Divine as Life,’ because it is Life - because ‘There is nothing but Life.'” (36)
           

Notes:
1. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind, Suny Press, Albany, New York, 2000, p. 5
2. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 388. Longmans Green & Co., New York, 1929
3. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Harper San Francisco, 1992, p.
4. ibid, p.
5. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910-1924, trs. Jane Bannard Green and M.M. Heerter, New York, Norton, 1947, pp 373-4)
6. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 278
7. Jeremy Naydler, Temple of the Cosmos and Shamanic Ritual in Egypt, Inner Traditions, Vermont
8. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Spectrum, US. 1975
9. Kübler-Ross, On Life After Death, Celestial Arts, Berkeley, CA, 1991
10. ibid, p. 30
11. ibid, p. 10
12. ibid, p. 11
13. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, quoted in review of this book, the Times, October 15th, 2005
14. On Death and Dying, p. 67
15. ibid, p. 68
16. ibid, p.
17. Peter and Elisabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying
18. David Fontana, Is There an Afterlife? O Books, Ropley, Hampshire UK
19. recounted to me by Joy Parker
20. Marie-Louise von Franz, On Death and Dying, Shambhala Publications Inc, Boston, Mass., p. 156 and 146
21. ibid, p. 147-8
22. ibid, p. 147-8
23. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 276
24. Cecil Collins, Angels, edited by Stella Astor, Fool’s Press, London, 2004, p. 43
25. G.R.S. Mead, Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition, first published John M. Watkins, London 1919. Third edition Solos Press, Dorset, UK, 1995?
26. ibid, p. 1
27. ibid, p. 1
28. G.R.S. Mead, from Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, John M. Watkins, London, 1906, p. 406. Another beautiful translation and interesting commentary has been made by John Davidson in The Robe of Glory, Element, Maryland, 1992
29. John Donne, “Hymn to God, My God”
30. Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC, Death, published by the Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, London 1977
31. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, Inner Traditions, Vermont, 2006, p. 65-66
32. Roger Woolger, Healing Your Past Lives, Sounds True, Boulder, CO, 2004
33. Edith Fiore, The Unquiet Dead
34. Edward Tick, War and the Soul, Quest Books, Wheaton, Ill, 2005
35. From an article “Klaus Heinemann, “Probing the Paranormal.” Sunday Times magazine, August 31st, 2008
36. Betty J. Kovács, The Miracle of Death, The Kamlak Center, California, 2003

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Light and Love as the Pulse of the Cosmos

We are each woven with threads of Love into the web of all being - Burl Hall (Sophia's Web)

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