Show Me Freedom

Doing dream work is a highly effective way to gain understanding of yourself and your life.

Part of that dream work, a big part, is keeping a dream journal. Recording the details of your dreams on paper is an absolute necessity. By being able to ‘go back in time’ and read the details of your dreams you have the distinct advantage of hindsight, and evolving perspective at present, with which to review the dream’s contents and possible meanings. Often, dreams will speak to you of the future, and recorded dreams allow you to gain deeper insight into yourself as you grow through time’s passage.

Dreams are your immersion into the inner world of fluid being.

I was reading over my dream journal this morning and came across one dream that surprised me at the time. But now I get it, or rather, am getting it.

One night, around late August or early September of 2008, I lay in bed to go to sleep. I asked my Spirit for a dream. Usually, I would ask for a dream in answer to a specific question. This night, however, I had nothing pressing on my mind but I was feeling playful and wanted an intimate moment with my Spirit through my dream life. It’s like a couple going out on a spontaneous date to the movies, or dinner, or a hike through the woods as a way of rekindling romance and fun.

I requested of my Spirit, ‘Show me freedom.’

I then drifted off into the void of blackness that precedes total immersion into the inner world. I remember smiling and feeling excited as I drifted.

That night I had the following dream (transcribed from my journal):

I was in the apartment (where I lived in Jamaica Plain) which was as dark as night. I was in the bedroom and I floated to the living room in a flying (horizontal) position. I peeked into the kitchen and Dicky (my older brother who passed away in 1995) was in there doing chores. He was emptying the dishwasher, I think. There were 2 other people in the kitchen but I couldn’t tell who they were.

A young white woman, in her mid to late 20′s, was following me. She was my student or apprentice. I was teaching her how to work with the darkness.

I led her to a door that opened up to a bedroom (neither of which exist in real life). I entered the bedroom while in the middle of the lesson. The bedroom was visually and energetically dark. She followed me into the bedroom. We walked through the bedroom into and she continued into an adjoining bathroom.

Then, for demonstration purposes, I started doing an energetic projection with my hands, sending energy to her as she stood in the bathroom facing me.  I was still standing in the bedroom. This was part of the teaching on how to work with the darkness.

I made several attempts with no success even though I was trying very hard. Then, a breakthrough. Dark energy entered her. Charged with the dark energy, she rushed toward me with her hands raised in front of her. She overpowered me, knocking me to the ground as her hands grasped mine. She straddled me as I lay on my back. She growled, her eyes rolling back in her head.

I was not afraid, realizing this was part of the lesson and the work.

When I awoke from this dream it occurred to me that this was in answer to my request, ‘show me freedom.’ But how? When I asked to be shown freedom I never thought a dream about working with dark energies would be the answer.

First, to immediately jump at the first or most obvious interpretation of a dream is a mistake. Dreams are realms of thought, feeling, metaphor, and myth that are layered with meaning. Dreams are their own language and do not fit neatly within the syntax of our daily waking lives.

To rely on a dream dictionary is also folly. I used to do this. I’d look up the various dream symbols communicated in my dreams to see what they could mean. I was going by the book. Your life and, moreover, your personal myth do not follow any book. There may be guiding principles and archetypes that can help inform your search into the meanings and patterns manifest in your life but you are also free to stretch those references if you are guided to do so. Follow your intuition here.

Read, yes, but don’t stop there.

Read mythology (Egyptian, Babylonian, Biblical, Greek, Native American, Indigenous myths, etc.), read Jung, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Joseph Campbell, Sufi writings (as presented by Idries Shah, who considered the Western psyche in his presentations) read writings by mystics (St. John of the Cross, Buddha, Rasputin, etc, etc.). Read Manly P. Hall, Gerald Massey, Carlos Castaneda, Paulo Coelho, Sir James Frazer, William James, Andrew Harvey, Christmas Humphries, Malidoma Some, Robert Anton Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Rilke, Rumi, Khalil Gibran, etc., etc., etc.

But more than books, read your life, your past, your present, your patterns, your lovers, your relationships, your friendships, your parents, your family history, your dreams, your daydreams, your imaginings, your thoughts, your ideas, your feelings, your fears, your doubts, your goals in childhood, high school, college, and now.

Take note of things like your favorite books, your favorite authors, your favorite movie(s), your favorite songs and musicians, your favorite colors, your favorite foods, your favorite memories.

Look at paintings, photographs, sketches, sculptures. Read poems, parables, and prose. Create some yourself and take note of your body, your thoughts, your feelings, the process, the moment. If you’ve created art of any kind in the past then revisit it from time to time to glean new insights and revelations.

Notice the animals that cross your path, the formations of clouds and what you see in them, the wind and what you hear and feel, the sound of the waters as they fall, flow, drip, and gush.

Look. Listen. Feel.  Ponder. These are your classrooms. Your lessons will become apparent. Your teacher is ever-present. Your understanding will emerge in its own time. You have no tests or grades. You will earn no degrees. You will never graduate. You must never drop out.

Now go, and find your own freedom.

One Penny at a Time

In 1995 I was a member of a Seventh Day Adventist church in the Bronx. I was a sincere, devout follower of church doctrine and bible teachings as I had always been whenever I chose to belong to any religious group. From beginning of my spiritual journey began (in this lifetime) around the age of 5 or 6, when I attended my first Catholic mass, all I ever desired was to be ‘close to God’, to be perfectly at one with Creator.

One summer night in 1995 I was visiting my mother who was living in the Bronx neighborhood where I grew up. At the end of my visit I headed back to my place. In order to travel back and forth between my mother’s home and mine I had to take a couple of buses.

I started the 7 to 8 block walk up Freeman Street toward the bus stop. I counted the change I had in my pocket to make sure I could cover the bus fare which was $1.50 at the time. I had exactly $1.40 and that was all the money I had with me.

Because I always had a deep desire to live purely ‘by faith’, relying solely and directly on Creator to fulfill my needs, I was constantly trying to prove to myself that I was indeed faithful in my effort to please Creator.

That was my sincere view and attitude at the time.

So I whispered a prayer as I walked and the prayer went something like this:

“Father, I have $1.40 and I need 10 cents more to get on the bus. You see and know all things and You know I cannot get on the bus to get home unless I have the full fare. If it be Your will, please send me 10 cents somehow. Or else, the only other thing I can think of is to borrow the 10 cents from Shawn (a childhood friend who lived near the bus stop where I was headed), and I don’t want to do that because it will give the impression to him that Your children are not taken care of by You. Yet, I will borrow the money from him unless, somehow, You send me that dime.”

I whispered the prayer and continued to walk toward the bus stop, believing that my prayer would be answered.

As I neared the street where Shawn lived, where I’d have to take the right turn to go to his home, I gently, in my mind, said, “Ok, Father, I’m trusting in You.”

I started to take the right around the corner when I happened to look down. Lying there on the street about a foot from the curb was a shiny……penny.

When I saw it I smiled and chuckled a bit while saying within myself, “Ok, Father, I realize You will give me the 10 cents one penny at a time. I thank You, I thank You, I thank You.”

In that moment I FULLY believed with the firmest faith that I was going to find 9 more pennies before reaching Shawn’s home. I bent down to pick up the penny, feeling tremendous gratitude and joy for finding the penny.

I bent down low to pick up the penny. As I grabbed it with 2 fingers, out of the corner of my eye about 2 feet away, I saw something shiny.

I looked over at the shiny object, and what I saw lying there was……..a dime.

This small experience offers profound lessons for me.

First, faith is a powerful spiritual force in the Universe. It’s real. I’m not sure it matters what you place your faith in because it will work no matter what.

When I read the stories of Jesus performing healings on the sick or restoring sight to the blind I take careful note of the words when he says, ‘Your faith has made you whole.’ He doesn’t say, ‘I made you whole,’ or ‘God made you whole’ or ‘Your faith in me/god/the weather made you whole.’ He says simply, ‘Your faith has made you whole.’

Faith is a way of developing intimacy with the Universe. It’s a way of connecting with something unseen, within us and around us, that responds in ways that evade scientific understanding or purely rational, logical sense. Faith leaves room for the mystery of life and inspires child-like wonder, but is never childish.

Second, prayer is communication. It’s one part of a dialogue. Listening is the other part which is called meditation (by us) and whatever it is known as by the listening Universe. Prayer is most effective when it’s spoken with the heart, with sincerity and simplicity. Reciting prayers, as I learned to do during my Catholic childhood, is not as engaging, not as dynamic – they’re not my words, my thoughts, my feelings. Yet, reciting prayers can be done as a form of concentrative or even active meditation, like dancing, sex or art. But I prefer the wordlessness of dancing and art for active meditation.

Also, praying to Creator through internal focus I find to be as powerful, no, more, as by external focus. By internal versus external, I mean direction – directing my thoughts inward rather than outward. It’s just as powerful an exercise of imagination and faith and reinforces more forcefully my sense of oneness with Creator. That is, Creator in me, through me, as me. This is why I prefer silent prayer over vocalized prayer.

The next lesson is that when I saw the penny I could have kept walking. I could have. It was not the dime I asked for and needed. I easily could have continued on my way with my focus on finding and settling for nothing less than the dime. I could have complained that it was only a penny. I could have rejected the penny on the basis that my faith in finding a dime was being tested. I could have rejected the penny and continued to Shawn’s house secure in faith in my ‘plan B’.

I could have, but I didn’t.

Instead, I saw the humor in the irony of finding the penny, accepted it, and felt and expressed sincere gratitude for it. Finding humor in life, in pain and disappointment, is a special alchemical skill. Growing up in adverse conditions in the South Bronx, I, like my family and friends, can find reasons to laugh and celebrate in the presence of pain. This exercise of spirit transforms the soul’s suffering into gold.

I then bent down low to pick it up. Sometimes we have to reach low points in life, be willing to humble ourselves, or be humbled, in order to find our way back up. The only way to harvest the fruit is by burying the seed.

In the bible story of Jacob, for example, Jacob had to experience exile, alienation, and karmic adversity before he could find redemption. Because he tried taking only shortcuts to get what he wanted earlier in life, Jacob had to endure being cheated and lied to for many years before receiving his reward. And it was the love of a woman that inspired him, prospered him, and perfected his love for Creator.

There are other lessons embedded in this experience which I will not go into here. What I share is enough wisdom to be gathered for a thousand harvests.

It Starts Here

We say we want to see Creator

yet do not see each other.

We say we want to hear Creator

yet do not listen for within.
We say we want to know Creator
yet do not know ourselves.

Imaginational Freefall

My post today is about the womb of imagination, the birthplace of anything goes. I’m sharing a fun trick today, although ‘trick’ is not quite the right word….not like ‘imaginational’, anyway.

You might be wondering what I mean by ‘imaginational freefall’. Basically  ‘imaginational freefall’ is a bungee jump from a bridge of thought, attention, or intention without a harness. You don’t need much, if any, training and whatever instruction I share with you might have to be thrown out because it just might get in the way.

So I will share with you what I’ve done on occasion and we’ll take it from there. Actually, I’ll share some details of my last imaginational freefall and I will drop (hint)s along the way.

Recently, after finishing a shower, I was drying off and as I was doing so I took notice (hint) of the act of drying off . I paid total attention to the feel of the towel, the swiping action of my arms, the sight and feeling of the water droplets on my skin, the sound of my breathing as I was drying off (hints).

I then widened the circle of my attention (hint) to the bathroom tiles on the walls, the floors, the structure of the bath and shower, the edifice of the house, and the existence and essence of all these things. I carried my thought to our planet as a whole and wondered at the innumerable inventions we have introduced to a planet of earth, water, and sky.

Ultimately, I flew (hint) out into space and could see Earth from a distance of light years. I looked around at the stars and galaxies nearby and distant. I was in awe. I imagined life on other planets, in other worlds, and started flying over great, imaginational distances and viewed several worlds simultaneously, wondering (hint) what the details of their lives were.

Then I ‘landed’….back on Earth….in my little bathroom.

I guess you could say I ‘woke up’.

Ok, these were the mechanical details of an imaginational freefall. The imaginational part should be obvious. The freefall part is not so obvious and yet is.

What is a freefall? In physical terms, it’s a fall with no grounding, no support,  and no slowing down. You’re riding gravity’s pull and the higher you are the faster you fall.

Now, if you’ve ever free-fallen from any height (a cliff, a building, or a high diving board, for example, in reality or in dreams) then you know the physical feeling of that falling momentum, right? The involuntary pull of your weight, the centripetal surge of your insides. It’s a freaky feeling and can be scary (in fact, the only 2 fears we’re born with are the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling).

Well, this literally is the feeling I get during imaginational freefall. I experienced it during the episode I just described above, and it’s a physical signal that I’m truly in imaginational freefall, but one that I cannot take notice of for more than a trillionth of a nano-moment or else I ‘land’, if you know what I mean.

So what are the instructions on how to do this? And what the heck is the point??

As I already shared with you, there are hints in the account above. I don’t want this to get too instructional because that defeats the purpose which is ultimately and necessarily to awaken your inner mystic.

I’ll briefly list the hints from above and you can fill in the empty spaces of knowing with the substance of your experiences.

1) Remember, an imaginational freefall is a ‘bungee jump from a bridge of thought, attention, or intention without a harness.’  It’s about letting go and stepping off the edge of what you know, or think, is sure and stepping into the groundless space of imagination with no harness, i.e., with no self-consciously guided thought, no precedent, no destination. Just freefall.

2) Take notice. Total immersion of your attention and awareness on the moment. The moment could include what is around you physically, sensually. Or the moment could be just what is going on internally – thoughts, feelings, images. Or both. You define the moment….wait, that might be too active, too masculine (energetically); better yet, let the moment define itself, tell you what it is and you just take notice (passivity is the needed state for a successful, fun imaginational freefall). Stay totally receptive. Take notice. Take, receive – get it?

3) When you take notice, be aware of the sensations – what do you see? what do you hear? what do you feel, smell, taste? Don’t think about you are sensing – just feel it, see it, smell, hear it. Get it? If what you sense is internal only then, again, what do you see, smell, hear, feel?

4) Expand. If it is appropriate, widen your circle of awareness. I mention this (about appropriateness) because, again, you don’t want the driving force to be you in thinking mode. Remember, in a physical freefall you are being pulled, you are not pushing or directing – in other words, you are not in control. It is the same with imagination.

Also, expanding your circle of awareness may not be needed – maybe you just want to stay confined to a small patch of imagination, especially as you start these exercises. That’s fine. At times you may want to explore only a leaf, or a cell, or an atom; or you may fly as a hummingbird, run as a cheetah, or swim as a blue whale; or you may lie on the pavement as a homeless man, play as a saxophonist in a jazz club, or negotiate the ultimate peace treaty among nations as a head of state. Depending upon where you leap from (a thought, a focus of attention, or an intention) you will feel your way through the freefall.

5) Fly. This can be mastered somewhat easily or it can ruin your freefall. It’s similar in principle to expanding your awareness. When you really get good at imaginational freefall you can introduce an element of ownership and still remain in freefall. It’s similar to lucid dreaming in which you are aware that you are in dream state and decide to ‘own’ your dream actions through self-guidance. I know this may seem to contradict what I mentioned in ‘step’ 1 (these are not steps, this is not linear). It doesn’t. In any case, you will experience many seeming contradictions and inconsistencies but in the realm of imagination, anything goes, and usually does.

I’ll give you an example from real life: a man leaped from a burning skyscraper to avoid burning to death. A photojournalist observed the man falling and took about a dozen photos of his descent. The photojournalist observed that the falling man stopped flailing his arms and legs at some point, put his arms close to his sides, and continued headfirst for the rest of his fall. Apparently, the body language signaled that the man changed from a state of resistance (evidenced by his flailing arms and legs) to one of acceptance and even ownership (arms to his sides, headfirst). The photojournalist commented that the photos of the man, at the point when he ‘took control’, appeared as if he was flying through the air, not falling.

6) Wonder. Be the child again. Wonder, marvel, enjoy. Just don’t think about it like I did, not if you don’t want to land. Be fascinated, be not startled. Marvel, but say nothing is marvelous. Say nothing. Think nothing. Remain in child-like wonder – no thinking, no analyzing, no defining, no resisting. Wonder, do not ponder. Just wonder. Because you will anyway.

Well, this is it, I think.

Now that you’ve read the instructions, discard them. Listen, but don’t follow. Just do. You want your experience to inform your reading/learning, not the other way around. You will have your own discoveries, receive your own revelations, and share your own stories. And what you experience may depart and even disagree with what I’ve shared. That’s fine. You must experience your own truth.

And this is the point of imaginationa freefall – to experience your own truth, your own imagination, and exercise them freely and creatively.The point is to awaken the inner ‘mystic’ within you, that artist of life that expresses uniquely as you and through you.

Doing so will help you establish your own authority and sovereignty in the realm of imagination. Your mind is your own and is your willing servant in the act of creation. Using your will to direct its creative energies will help you discover and experience your innate powers of thought, will, and imagination.

From childhood we are conditioned to give our minds in deference to external ‘truths’ and ‘authorities’. We do this by agreeing with them and assimilating their precepts and teachings, often unconsciously. As a result of this the skies of our imagination become clouded with information and knowledge that stifle the free-ranging, creative self. We must reclaim our minds and imagination and recover our uniquely expressive selves.

Imaginational freefall can show you how.

Reflecting on Birth and Silence

When my son was born I was the first to see his head emerge. It was a water birth and I was the only witness to this  moment. In the days and months that have followed the birth I have revisited the moments of that day, reflecting on how it went and what it meant.

When my son emerged and laid on his mother’s breast, vocalizing his first sounds with the sweet, robust cries of purpose, my heart raced through a storm of emotions and my breathing barely could keep up. All I could muster were heaving cries with the mysterious, powerful energies triggered by the genesis of life. A holy trinity was born in that moment – a son was born and in being born gave birth to a mother and father.

I can’t articulate much of the feelings coursing through me at my son’s birth. This makes sense since I too was born at his birth, experiencing a new world of being. The old world was washed over with new rains, my vision immersed in strange waters, and any articulation retreated to the twilight of our mingled creation.

The absence of words serves a great purpose: it sharpens the receptive sensibilities. Words and any kind of projection  muddy the waters of sublime experience. There are moments that deserve our best silence. Those moments need to remain in the emergent state, never quite arriving, when the only sign we seek is the breath, telling us that life is present. And that is enough.

With pronounced receptivity we glean the whispers of illumination contained in hidden rooms of silence.

Yet, there’s more.

If we persist in our deference to the silence we may hear the invitation by more silent forces that reside within our being. Our own lives and the living of it take on added nuance and meaning, and to us are revealed previously unknown aspects of our being that can inspire us through their revelations.

For the same reason, and by similar dynamics, great visual art remains wordlessly compelling, and yet its story can be told, or even better, new ones created, for centuries and millenia by the observers that choose to tell them.

The art, much like the life-changing experience and the memories that follow, remains in silence – watching, observing, looking for the sign of life, and no more. It knows better than that.