The 24 Hour Mind

"Instead of assuming, as Hobson does, that most dreams have fairly obvious connections to everyday life, Sumber guides dreamers in ferreting out interpretations that might not be readily apparent. “I encourage people to be their own analyst: ‘What do I think this dream means to me? Is this an “oatmeal” dream, or is it a big dream?’ ” 

He thinks thorough consideration of one’s own dreams can be life-changing because of the submerged truths they reveal. He himself has a fear of sharks, but a dream he had one night, in which he was sitting in a rowboat, watching fishermen chop off sharks’ fins and toss the dying animals back into the sea, helped him cope with that fear. Reflecting on the dream and its deeper meaning proved transformational, Sumber says. The sharks likely represented Jung’s universal “monster” dream theme, and his sadness at their plight led him to a place of unexpected empathy for his own dark side and that of others.

While disagreements like these persist, most dream theorists do agree on this point: Dreams often have a fundamentally emotional nature. The limbic system, which governs emotion, is highly engaged in dreamers—particularly the amygdala, which helps us process unpleasant or intense feelings like fear and aggression. “All the contemporary theories of dreaming,” writes sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, “emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes ... but about emotion.” 

Hobson acknowledges the importance of emotions to dreaming, as does Hartmann, who has suggested that the striking central images in post-9/11 dreams sprang from intense emotion. His study, he wrote, “supports the idea that the dream image is an emotionally guided construction or creation, not a replay of waking experience.”¹ 

This suggests the tantalizing possibility that common dream themes may reflect similarities in the human emotional experience—which persist despite variations in the external trappings of language and culture—and that the mental territory we all share is more vast and profound than that which separates us. Which is very Jungian indeed."

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/why-you-keep-dreaming-about-being-naked

The 7 Psychological Functions of Art

"Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morris’s floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness."

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/25/art-as-therapy-alain-de-botton-john-armstrong/

Safed Lakota Visions

"As a young man I went up on a hill. In dreams I met strange beings of Safed. Ari and Ramak told me of worlds within worlds and the Sefirot. We smoked the peace pipe and spoke of Wakan Tanka who they knew by unspeakable names."

Chief Ocean Wind

Kabbalah 2: hide and seek with G-d

"This view is the Kabbalah's secret meaning of the union of the male and female principles. The male principle, symbolized by the line, is that which divides the unified one (female - circle) into conceptual dyads. Good and evil, dark and light, past and future -- these concepts do not really exist in the One. The feminine circle is always Now, always Here, always God Godding itself. Well, which is right? Is the feminine principle right that everything is One and that it is always Now? Or is the masculine principle right, that there are multiple objects in the universe, across temporal and spatial dimensions?

For the Kabbalists, both are right. Ordinary consciousness, in which 1+1 = 2, is right. Mystical consciousness, in which 1+1=1, is right. There is both two and one -- this is the higher mystery of union. It's the original fuzzy math."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/an-introduction-to-kabbal_b_441069.html

"The ten sefirot -- the lenses which refract the Light of the Infinite into the colors and shapes of our own experience -- are a web of associations, symbolic references, and Divine potency. Each is like a node of meaning, bringing together hundreds, if not thousands, of literary, cultural, physical, emotional, historical, theological and magical concepts and, thus, demonstrating the interrelationship of them. When a Kabbalist hears the word "orchard," or "red," or "rainbow," he or she immediately associates it with the corresponding sefirah, and then with the dozens of other concepts which are likewise associated. Learning the sefirot is marinating the mind in a symbolic stew of Divine interrelation, and engenders a uniquely Kabbalistic mode of consciousness."

"Hochmah, meaning wisdom, is like a point: no dimension of its own, but the beginning point for dimensionality. From our perspective, hochmah is that "higher wisdom" that some systems call primordial Awareness. It is the first quality to proceed from Nothingness: that Being knows. This noetic quality of the universe -- that every leaf "knows" when to fall in the autumn, that every atom "knows" how to organize itself -- is, for the Kabbalists, the most refined quality of the manifested world. If you'd like to imagine the emanation of the sefirot in terms of the Big Bang, hochmah is the singularity with no size, but with the "laws of nature" already instantiated. There is nothing there, but there is the Divine Wisdom which organizes all of creation.

Binah, meaning understanding, is a kind of partner to Hochmah. The sefirot are often gendered (sometimes multi-gendered), and their interaction is often depicted as a series of erotic interchanges. In this case, hochmah is the male and Binah is female, the Divine womb, the generative principle of the rest of the universe. Binah gives birth to the sefirot, and thus to the world of manifestation itself. She is the concealed, hidden, supernal Divine mother. She is also the beginning of separation -- binah is related to the words for knowledge based upon distinctions. Binah is the ocean, the many-chambered palace (note the Jungian flavor to the symbolic associations here), and womb in which Hochmah sows the seed of creation. She is the ground of space and time -- not yet expanded, not yet contracted, but the principle of spatiality and temporality itself, ready to give birth to the world."

"Let's pause for just a moment to explore a few of the subtleties -- just the tip of the iceberg, really -- in these first three sefirot. First, notice that even at this highest, most abstract level, many of the themes of the Kabbalah are already in play. For those who expect only male god-language, and who suppose there is a hard and fast distinction between religion and sexuality -- well, surprise. The Kabbalah is rich in feminine goddess-language, even as it strives to integrate these different faces of the Divine within a monotheistic system. The Kabbalah is also rich in erotic metaphor -- if hochmah and binah seem surprisingly embodied, wait until we get to tiferet, yesod, and shechinah/malchut. Nor is eros merely metaphor -- it's not "like" sexual union, it is the essence of sexual union; it's what generativity and sexuality are ultimately about. Whether the union between masculine and feminine takes place between two people, or within one person, it is ultimately about the play of the Divine itself."

Kabbalah 1

"The fundamental task of theosophical Kabbalah is to explain the structure of the universe, especially how the universe can exist at all if God is truly infinite. Think about it: if God is infinite, then why are there computers, desks, people, trees, and sky? Why does the world appear to be a place of separate objects, thrown together by chance, and hardly "filled with Divine light"? If everything is God, why does it look like this?

Now, as we've already seen, Kabbalists have a very different, and often surprising, idea of "God" from what we normally do. In fact, the concept of "God" (Elohim) is a concept that evolves, over time, from the Infinite -- what we think of as "God" is only one face of the ein sof, the Infinite. So, as you read through this introduction to theosophical Kabbalah, you may find yourself thinking "This is not the God I learned about in Sunday school" or "This is not the God I hear people talking about on television." Good -- that is a sign that you're getting it."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/an-introduction-to-kabbal_b_379296.html

"For Cordovero... The universe is inconceivably vast, and every subatomic particle of it is filled with God. Here's Cordovero developing that point further:

The essence of God is in every thing, and nothing exists outside of God. Because God causes everything to be, it is impossible that any created thing exists except through Him. God is the existence, the life, and the reality of every existing thing. The central point is that you should never make a division within God . . . If you say to yourself, "The Ein Sof expands until a certain point, and from there on is outside of It," God forbid, you are making a division. Rather you must say that God is found in every existing thing. One cannot say, "This is a rock and not God," God forbid. Rather, all existence is God, and the rock is a thing filled with God . . . God is found in everything, and there is nothing besides God.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/an-introduction-to-kabbal_b_329921.html

"To be sure, this is a God very different from the ordinary one -- a "God beyond God," as it were, neither a paternalistic judge nor a partisan warrior, but Ein Sof, Beingand Nothingness, without end or limit, and thus filling every molecule of this page and every synapse in the brain. God is who is reading these words and writing them, who is thinking and what is thought. This is the world without an observer, with no inside and no outside, in which That (what seems to be without) and You (what seems to be within) are the same. And with this radically different conception of God come very different expressions of Judaism: elite, often hidden traditions quite unlike the mass religion of rituals, myths, and dogmas.

This God is less a God that does or doesn't exist, but existence itself. To paraphrase from a non-Kabbalistic source, the yoga sutras of Patanjali, God does not exist -- God is existence itself. Moreover, from God's point of view, all of the distinctions we make -- between ourselves and the world outside ourselves, among objects in the world, etc. -- are completely illusory, because ultimately there is only the undifferentiated unity of the Ein Sof, the Infinite."

"In theosophical Kabbalah, As one learns these symbols, one deepens one's vocabulary of experience, and becomes more and more attuned to the minute fluctuations of it. What today might be called "energetic shifts" are, in Kabbalistic parlance, minute transformations in the structure of experience itself. Even the most ordinary of moments gives birth to endless networks of associations, levels of understanding, and hidden structures. If you really immerse yourself in theosophical Kabbalah, learning the Zohar, coming to know its symbols, you will discover for yourself that the chains of associations begin to flow very easily. You can "jam" with the Zohar the way a jazz musician jams on a motif in a composition. You can feel the interplay of energies (and I use this term very loosely) in your lived experience. And you gradually begin to open up, deepen, and receive."

"Just from this short description, you can see how different the methods of prophetic Kabbalah are from those of theosophical Kabbalah. Prophetic, or ecstatic, practice does not fine-tune the senses to the minute fluctuations of the sefirot; it shakes up the mind until it can see reality directly. Now, prophetic Kabbalah does still work with the language and topics of Kabbalah -- sefirot, letters of the alphabet, Divine names, and so on. However, it uses those resources to engender a mystical experience."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/an-introduction-to-kabbal_b_346934.html

 

Entering my 61st Spring...

"Entering my 61st Spring I met Jude and Ha Ari and my heart soared."

Chief Ocean Wind

The View from Here Dec 2011

My old pastor friend Dr. Les Pugh use to do an annual sermon in which he pondered about his current beliefs and values… I think he called it something like “The View From Here”… (one of the phrases he tended to weave in each year- from Flannery O’Connor I think- was “the silent working of good”).

I think this is an excellent exercise but I’m feeling lazy this week and I have too many books to read so I’m just posting a few earlier thoughts on this topic… at this point in the journey the more things change the more they remain the same for me.

Regardless of your ideology, may peace rule in your heart, mind, home and work… and, may the force be strong with you.

Fomrism

A number of years ago I decided to try my hand at creating a new religion from scratch. Symbols, deities, virtues, liturgy... I'd settled on the perennial philosophy as the bedrock of my personal belief system and this struck me as a useful endeavor.

I decided to structure it as a polytheistic system of belief as opposed to monotheistic. 7 gods. I saw this less as a belief in multiple Gods but more of a belief in God being beyond our finite comprehension (hence, the ultimate ground of our being manifesting in multiple facets- like a prism). Or, as the Tao says, "The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao".

It didn't take long for me to lose interest in this, Fomrism, as a religion per se, and rather begin to see it as an exercise in developing a system for living. I also progressively saw this system as an attempt to encapsulate all of reality in a conceptual structure- hence, an intellectual endeavor.

In writing my last blog, "Why we exist", I realized that my explorations into Fomrism still guide my sense of why we exist (and how we should live) strongly. Apart from the "religious" aspects of the system (and the intellectual pursuit of placing all the universe in one basket), here is what Fomrism has taught me concerning how to live.

It is worth saying that I don't consider any of this original... it seems rather to me like an alchemical amalgam of all I've encountered life to date.

You can call these concepts values or characteristics or goals or virtues... Ultimately it has become for me a how to live life to-do list of sorts with archetypes.

• Wonder, awe, mystery, silence The unknown
• Union, synthesis, peacemaking King and Queen in union
• Nurture, loving-gentleness, kindness, mercy-charity The mother
• Passion, kaizen, energy The love between
• Justice, truth, wisdom The father
• Strength, doing right, courage The warrior prince son
• Beauty, creativity, compassion The healer princess daughter

Why we exist...

Why do we exist?

For some reason this particular question has been somewhat of an obsession for me in many periods of my life. I'm not sure why this particular question has meant so much to me over such an extended period of time. I'm inclined to think that there are many other questions that would have been more practical and/or useful... for example, what is the best way to earn money? How does one master the craft of songwriting? How do you write programming code for IPhone apps?

But why? Why has my mind, over so many years, has that question taken hold of me with such a relentless grip? I've considered the genetic possibilities... "Micro" and "Macro"... "Micro", I inherited this interest from my mom and pop (even grandparents, aunts/uncles). This doesn't seem right to me based on my recollections (although my great great grandfather on my dad's side was a moyel). I've settle on "Macro" as the driving influence. Jung speaks of the collective unconscious and I've wondered if my Jewish blood (and the collective unconscious of my peeps) has been a factor here. I don't have a better explanation at this point.

Many things have made sense to me in answer to this question over many years...

• It's an unsolvable mystery... who can know why we are here?
• Existentialism per Irvin Yalom (with credit to Victor Frankl's logotherapy)- Life has no inherent meaning... all we can do is attempt to piece together a meaning that holds together for each of us through life's travails.
• Absurdity per Steve Martin- Steve majored in philosophy in college and tells the story of sitting in the laundromat trying to determing the meaning of it all and coming to the firm conclusion that there is no meaning, the best we can do is laugh and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
• Christianity- Man exists to know, love and serve God through Jesus Christ.
• Judaism- Man exists for Tikkun Olam (to heal the world).
• Buddhism- Stop asking such silly questions and just be a compassionate being.
• Confucianism- We exist to be good, to honor our ancestors, to refine the self.
• Hinduism- We exist to become perfect.
• My own personal musings have included a few key options...
• We exist for joy.
• We exist to evolve.
• We exist because we exist (a variant of that saying, "We're here because we're here")

Who really knows why we exist? There are a multitude of opionions. Despite this there are some good common themes. Some time soon I'll blog on Aldous Huxley's, The Perrenial Philosophy... It focuses on themes shared in common by various faith paths.

My current position draws from all I've read, seen, heard and thought over these years...

We exist for joy- joy does not necessarily mean being happy.
We exist to serve- compassion as a way of being with the human family (and ourself).
We exist to evolve- we are accountable for how we play the hands of cards life deals us.
We exist to enjoy- to relish creation and life.
We exist to create- offspring, art, peace.
We exist to wonder- at all the mystery that surrounds us in the universe.
We exist to synthesize- to bring harmony where there is discord.
We exist to nurture- people, the earth, ideas, our soul.
We exist to burn- to be passionate about things and people that matter to us.
We exist to ensure justice- to fight for what is right and just and equitable.
We exist to be fathers, kings, sons, warriors and princes.
We exist to be mothers, queens, daughters, healers and princesses.
We exist to know the rapture of immersion in beauty... to make it... to be taken by it.

This is enough of an answer for me for now.

And one for good measure…

The Mystic Dean Moriarty: from the Gospel According to Kerouac

Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong.

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed.

He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"

He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles-how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter.

"Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes- that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things- Oh, the things-I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault."

We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. "Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way 1 am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)-"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side."

There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word "pure" a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

~Jack Kerouac "On the Road"