Category: Dreams

The Emperor Has A Scheme

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams1 Comment

Back in 2004 I was living at the Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham Ashram in Lodi California. While I was there we had a weekly dream group, and I remember one meeting very well because both myself, and another resident, Dakshina, had a cold. The dream I shared was one in which a zombie had touched me, and then I woke up ill the next morning. If I remember right Dakshina also had a dream that showed her being attacked and then she came down with the cold, but I don’t recall that for sure. Regardless, all of us there saw the connection between my cold and my dream, viewed it as an attack of a hostile force against me.

Roughly a month ago I had this dream:

It’s the scene from Return of the Jedi when the Emperor shows up in his shuttle at the Death Star. He is talking to Darth Vader telling him some scheme he’s cooked up and wants to show him something that has to do with it. They both board the shuttle and the Emperor shows Vader these two aliens that are basically just heads with tentacles coming off of them. They’re very ugly. I guess they are babies of an alien species, and were kidnapped by the Emperor. Vader thinks this is really cool that they’re going to be watching over these babies.

Now if I remember correctly the day before the dream (Friday) Jana got sick in the afternoon. Then on Saturday, the day of the dream, Dhina caught it too, and Lydia went down a day or two later. Jana and Dhina had it really bad with a fever and body aches, and were spending most of their time in bed. Lydia stayed sick the longest, and had a relapse after initially feeling better. Mugu got it too, and was mildly ill for a couple of days. Donny and I managed to keep it out for days, but then we also came down with symptoms, Donny with chest congestion and myself with a bad runny nose. We were both however only sick for a day. I drank two cups of the Indian version of chicken soup, called rasam, before going to bed and woke up feeling fine the next morning.

Now this dream isn’t as clear cut as the zombie one I had at Lodi, since I myself got sick the very next day, but this illness really lowered the energy of the house and made things difficult since some of the kids weren’t able to give even the grudging help we can normally get out of them. The Mother does say in Questions and Answers that a hostile attack “takes often the form of illness”1, and given the impact it had it seems to me a reasonable hypothesis that this illness, represented by the ugly aliens, was the scheme the hostile forces represented by Vader and the Emperor were hatching. As to why the attack was launched at the particular moment, I would guess it was because it was a few days before a darshan day at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and I suspect the attack was trying to spoil the darshan for us not just on the level of the individuals, but also on the level of the house itself, since it also is an entity in its own way. Unless you already believe in these sorts of things, there’s no way I can convince you the darshan days observed at the ashram are power days like a solstice or an equinox is, a day where there’s a force available to help you make a progress or have a powerful dream or some other kind of inner experience, but if you can at least accept that idea in theory, then I think you could see why forces hostile to spiritual progress would try to sabotage people in the yoga on those sorts of days.

It bears mentioning that the day before the darshan another thing happened that really lowered the energy of the house, which was getting the house sprayed for ants. Now in the USA when we get that done the exterminator will spray a little poison in the corners of your house and maybe put down some poison bait, and that was what I was expecting to happen. Here in India however they went all through the house spraying poison heavily along all the walls, so there were literally puddles of it all along the inner perimeter of the entire house. The stench was horrible and after the first round had dried they came along a few hours later and did it a second time. That second round took a couple of hours to dry, and then we were finally able to mop the floor, but the smell lingered for days. If I had known what they were going to do I would have never had them come and treat the house except for the ground floor, which had to be treated for termites. I’m sure it was even more grueling to endure for the people who were really sick, so it seems to me that the forces attacking us had a hand in seeing to it that the exterminator showed up on that day.

Now as it turns out I myself still had an okay darshan day, felt some calm that day, but nothing really interesting happened, nor did I have any powerful or lucid dreams. I did have a little inner opening and got a short formation of lines from my muse and then another longer formation two days later before things went back to the way they usually are which is a line or two here and there. Neither Donny or I had much luck interpreting those formations though, since it wasn’t clear who or what they were relating to, but it was nice to get that little opening. So what was accomplished by this hostile attack is hard for me to say, but I know that even though I wasn’t sick, when I was sitting in my room in the stifling stench of ant poison, the energy of the house felt very, very low, and that even the house itself as an entity was affected. None of our young people here are trying to follow the yoga of Sri Aurobindo or any other yoga for that matter, but we still have a collective process here. So maybe it was that collective process that lost the chance to make a progress. That’s just speculation however.

A question though this dream brings up in my mind is how do you know when a symbol in dream or vision actually relates to an illness? In the dream I had years ago in Lodi, illness was represented by a zombie, and in this dream, if I’m interpreting it correctly, the illness was represented by the ugly aliens. In addition, I wrote a blog post a while back in which a zombie seemed to represent a vital movement I was trying to throw out, so there doesn’t seem to be one universal symbol that can be pinned down as always being the symbol for an illness. If there is some way to know though when a dream is forecasting an illness, and that dream comes before the illness actually hits you, you could prepare, but like it is so often in dreams you usually don’t know what a dream means until afterwards.

This post is mainly just food for thought, but the knowledge, however, that there really are hostile forces and beings trying to keep us from progressing is important to see, and it’s something that at some point we’re going to wake up to as a species. The fact that it isn’t known or being talked about presently except on a very small scale is aiding the cause of these hostile forces. So if an article like this has helped someone to see that or opened their mind to that possibility or even just validated their beliefs about such things, then it’s served a purpose.

References

  1. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1929-1931, pg 55

Harm’s End or Boyz II Men?

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, DreamsLeave a comment

Dreams, in addition to showing things going on with you as an individual, can also give you a look at a bigger process such as a household or an organization. I had a dream recently that I felt was of this nature that was showing the process of our house Harm’s End. Here is the dream:

 I’m with two of the members of Boyz II Men. Myself and another black guy have been hired to fill in for the other two members who have quit the group. It’s just for one show, and we’re practicing a song for the performance. Later I’m with one of the regulars from the group at a restaurant, and I’m laughing and telling him how funny it will look for a white guy like me to come out with the three of them who are black. Joking I tell him that I should tell people I have the disease that turned Michael Jackson white.

 For readers who don’t know, my friend Donny and I are living in a large multi-apartment house in India with five Tamil youths (four male, 1 female) all in their late teens or early twenties, and the main focus of our house currently is the maturation process of these youths into adults, a process aptly and somewhat humorously mirrored by the symbol of Boyz II Men in the dream. The waking reality, like the situation in the dream, is also unusual since it’s two white Americans guiding five Tamils into adulthood with all seven of us sharing the same house in India as a family unit. Definitely not something you see everyday.

The fact that in the dream the arrangement is only for one show is interesting since both Donny and I feel that this type of work is only a temporary situation, and not our true calling nor what we feel the divine ultimately wants Harm’s End to be about. We feel that the purpose of Harm’s End is to be what, for lack of a better idea, you could call an ashram in the midst of life, a place where people can work on going beyond ego consciousness, and ending the harm they are doing both to themselves and their environment.

As it stands now, the youths in our charge are preparing themselves for a normal human life with no aspiration for anything higher. There is one though that we feel has the potential to reach for something higher, but it may be a long time before he’s ready to make that kind of change. So our house really is more Boyz II Men than Harm’s End at the moment, but at some point it appears that will change. When and how that happens is impossible to say, though Donny and I are both looking forward to moving beyond this phase of things. People in this age group are tough customers, and it gets even more wearisome when they’re actively resisting growing up and maturing the way our kids are doing to varying degrees. Donny and I are well aware that even if Harm’s End does evolve into an ashram in the midst of life, it doesn’t mean that the other people involved won’t be hard to deal with, but it will make a difference if those people have or are nursing a divine aspiration, and are actively trying to be sincere and honest with themselves. For that reason, though we do care about our charges, I think Donny and I probably won’t grieve when this Boyz II Men phase of things comes to the ‘End of The Road.’1

 Notes
1. This is the title of a well known Boyz II Men song and their first international hit.

Anti-Claus Is Comin’ To Town

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, DreamsLeave a comment
evil santa by Cubosh, on Flickr
“evil santa” (CC BY 2.0) by Cubosh

There’s a lot of traffic at our house Harm’s End in India, and some of those boys are thieves. So of course things get stolen, things belonging to people who live there, and also things belonging to guests. One of our live in boys, Asiya, had a friend whose cell phone was stolen at our house. A month or so after the theft Asiya showed up with the friend, and told Donny the boy was forbidden to return to his home until he got his cell phone replaced. Asiya claimed he and some other friends would come up with 4,000 rupees, and was asking, or rather demanding (Asiya was undergoing some rebellion at the time), that we come up with the other 2,000.

At the time I was living in the USA and would wire money to India on a weekly basis. Donny told me the situation, said he thought it was a need and that he felt sorry for the boy who’s sort of Forrest Gumpish, and mistreated by other boys as well as his family for that reason. To be frank, honesty is a problem to some extent with all the young people we work with, so I’m always skeptical of these kinds of things, and more so this time because of Asiya’s rebellion and attitude towards us. I found it hard to believe that the boy was banished from his house because his phone had gotten stolen, and wondered if the whole thing was a ruse to get 2,000 rupees for something else. I also didn’t think it was a good idea to give the money, and set that kind of precedent since we deal with people who wouldn’t have any moral quandary with lying about their phone getting stolen at our house in order to get a nice new phone on us. Also part of the equation was my general tightfistedness and dislike of charity that I went into in a recent blog post. There was even part of me that wanted to say no to Asiya because he was being rebellious and demanding, wanted to squash his demanding attitude and show him who was boss. So the answer I gave Donny was no.

Asiya persisted though, and when he would come to get money for his own needs he kept bringing it up, even brought the boy back a couple of times to ask Donny again. So I started to rethink things. I still didn’t believe that the kid was banished from home, but since Asiya didn’t drop it I started to wonder if maybe the boy really needed the money for some reason. So that night as I was praying I asked for some indication in the night of what I should do, be it a dream or muse or some kind of intuition. During that sleep cycle I had this dream:

I’m outside my maternal grandparent’s house in the driveway. I’m sitting in a car that looks like a station wagon, but it seems to me it might be a hearse. I realize this is a dream and I pass my hand through one of the windows to confirm it. Then I sit back and all of the sudden the car starts to move on its own. Things go dark around the outside of the car, and an image starts to appear on the windshield, but then the dream shifts to me being the observer. I can see this coffin with an arm sticking up out of it which is groping around. Seated next to the coffin is a Santa Claus, but one dressed in black not red. The arm grabs Santa and is pulling on him. Santa is talking to the person in the coffin.

The thing that struck me the most about the dream was the black dressed Santa or Anti-Claus as I thought of him. I felt that the dream was trying to show me that the desire not to give, to be stingy, to be Anti-Claus, was the main factor in my resisting giving the money, and not the objections I was raising such as not wanting to set a precedent etc. The black clothing also suggests to me that hostile forces were trying to influence me as well. The symbols of the hearse and the coffin suggest death of course, and maybe are showing that my Anti-Claus tendencies are a movement towards ‘death’, that is, away from growth and spiritual progress, a movement of decay. At the same time though, I have come a long way with my Anti-Claus nature compared to where I was a few years ago. So maybe the dream is also showing that movement is to some extent dead, but not completely. From that perspective the fact that the arm in the coffin is reaching out and grabbing Anti-Claus would show that I’m still not completely free of that movement of stinginess or the influence of hostile forces in this matter.

So I was basically convinced by the dream to give in to Asiya’s demand, but I guess there was part of me that still didn’t like having to admit I was wrong, so I thought I would wait until Donny mentioned Asiya bringing it up again. Donny didn’t though and maybe 10 days or so after the dream I finally broached the subject with him, and he told me he had given the friend the 2,000 rupees on his (Donny’s) birthday, and that he had sacrificed a few birthday treats for himself such as a cup of good coffee and a pastry at a local bakery, as well as a nice birthday dinner, to make up for the giving of the money. The vital initially got irked with Donny after hearing that, since as far as he knew at the time I still opposed to the giving, but I could see that feeling obviously wasn’t legitimate. Looking at it objectively I’d say I lost the opportunity to make the most progress in the matter by waiting for Donny to tell me Asiya brought it up again. I took the easy way out.

Still, I did see how my Anti-Claus nature was the predominant factor in not wanting to give the money, and not the other rationales I had. That was spelled out loud and clear by the dream, and I hope that will help me to see things more clearly in the future when other situations like this come up.

An Arising Of Desire

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Inner Voice and Vision, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Recently I attended a conference called ‘Pain: Its Cause and Cure’ at the Sri Aurobindo Center For Advanced Research (SACAR) in Pondicherry India. I had arranged to stay at the SACAR guest house and arrived the evening before the conference began. While eating dinner I got to know a lady from Texas named Debbie who was attending the conference as well. I also took note of a pretty young Indian woman who came into the dining area briefly, but I didn’t actually meet her.

That night I had this dream:

I’m attending a lecture at the pain conference. I’m next to Debbie, though she looks much younger, and we just end up holding hands. I’m feeling desire and thinking we might hook up later. I end up resting my head on our clasped hands, but this puts my head behind a tall guy so I can’t see the PowerPoint presentation on the projector screen.

The dream was a little puzzling for me because, although Debbie was admittedly cute for her age (60), I didn’t really feel attracted to her sexually, though I liked her personality-wise. Anyway, at 9 a.m. we all went into the lecture hall and sat ourselves at two person desks. A very tall Indian woman sat down in the seat directly in front of me, effectively blocking my view of the screen, so that I had to lean to the side and peer around her in order to see it. I was struck by the exactness of the outer event matching what had happened in the dream, and I figured there was some meaning there, but I wasn’t sure what it might be.  Arriving a little late was the pretty young Indian woman from the night before, and as is often the case when such beauty is around, my vital wants to eat it through my eyes, sexual staring I call it. It’s an urge that still just comes, like a reflex even though there’s part of me that would gladly be rid of it. As I sat there listening to the speakers, the desire would come in waves, and I would repeatedly have to use my will to keep pulling myself away from it. Later that afternoon I found myself sitting at the same table as her at lunch and found out her name, I’ll call her N. in this article, but I didn’t talk much to her. Then that evening at dinner she arrived late, and she sat down at the table with me and another American man, Don. The three of us conversed for a little while, and I found her quite charming and sweet as well as pretty. There was something too about her vital that my vital really found appealing, and I could feel that vital thrill you experience when you’re interacting with someone you’re really attracted to. It’s a kind of feeding, one you can keep at bay, but I didn’t do such a good job of it here. This thing in her vital though wasn’t anything flirtatious or overtly sexual, but quite the opposite really. She was actually very much a lady, and if you give my vital the choice between the tart and the lady it will take the lady the majority of the time though perhaps not every time.

At some point I excused myself to go up to my room, and that’s when my vital problems really began. What happened was the vital latched onto the idea of inviting N. to my house so she could see the work I’m doing here with some young tamil adults that live in a multi apartment complex with me and my partner in the endeavor Donny. It’s a work that’s been going on for a number of years, and Donny I both feel that what our house needs now, beyond some changes and structure within it, is for people in the community here to come and see what we’re doing. Since I knew I was going to this pain conference at SACAR and would be mixing with a large group of people, I was on the lookout for potential prospects to invite.

So with N. my vital took that ball and ran with it with, producing waves of thoughts and fantasies about bringing her to the house. Most of the scenarios the vital was cooking up we’re just about being around and her taking in her vital energy the same way I had at dinner the night before, but there were to a lesser degree outright romantic and sexual thoughts and feelings. The morning of that second day at the conference it was hard to stay focused because of the vital tumult. I kept trying to reject it, and also to turn my attention away from it by focusing on the lecturers and what they were saying.  I’d succeed for a while and there’d be a space of clarity, but then another wave of it would come and it became quite apparent that my dream from two nights before, and the way my view of the screen was actually physically blocked the day before were foreshadowing this vital movement which was ‘blocking’ my view of the conference. And though the love interest in the dream was a young Debbie, it was N. it was referring to.

One thing that really helped though as these waves of desire would come was something Donny and I had been talking about just days before that had come from his muse which said:

What is a victory,
getting over a temptation?
Getting over a limitation1

These lines may not look like much at first glance, but the idea here is quite powerful. Looking at something as a temptation automatically gives it the association of badness, and creates a resistance or aversion to it that just makes it harder to throw out. Looking it as a limitation though takes that charge away from it. You can still see it for what it is, which is something getting in the way of one’s sadhana and not make excuses for it, but you can deal with it in a more calm and detached manner. Which is what I was able to do.

Now in addition to taking that attitude of a limitation towards the vital desire, I also tried to reason with the vital, pointing out things like the fact that having N. visit the house would mean wrestling with this desire, and the fact that even if she was game and I was willing to put a halt to twelve years of celibacy, my lower back problems would make it impossible to really enjoy intimacy with her or anyone else for that matter. I don’t remember exactly at what point in the day it happened, but there was a decisive moment where my vital basically said “Yeah, you’re right” and let go of the idea of bringing her over to the house. At that moment I felt something lift within me and instantly felt lighter and more clear to the point that when Donny came to visit me at the SACAR guest house late that evening he remarked that I seemed to be quite clear and focused. The thoughts and imaginings of bringing N. to the house still came a little bit, but the vital push and urgency that had been behind them was just a fraction of what it had been before.

The next day however it became apparent that while the vital had let go of the desire to invite N. to the house, it still hadn’t totally let go of the desire to be around her and to interact with her while the conference was still going on. During lunch an Austrian man and I spoke a little Spanish to each other, and N., who was also at our table, showed some interest by mentioning she really likes a Netflix series called Narcos which is full of Spanish. So I took that opportunity to teach her a few words in Spanish as a way to interact with her. That in itself may not have been inappropriate. You can do something like that in the right way and for the right reason, and when I woke up on the morning of the fourth and last day of the retreat I made a strong resolution not to follow the vital’s desire to interact with N. and to try and handle whatever interaction came up in the right way, i.e. without vitally eating.

What was amazing though was that after having made that resolution it seemed like every time I turned around, there she was. So I taught her a number of Spanish words that day as well as explained some concepts in Spanish such as gender and different words for the verb ‘to be’. I also talked about places I’d traveled in Latin America and she told me she had a sister that was living in Mexico. I tried not to vitally eat, but I don’t think I was completely successful. The truth is I still have things to learn regarding the subtleties of when I’m vitally eating or not eating when having these more casual interactions with someone I’m sexually attracted to. Overall though, I felt pretty good about things at the end of the day, felt like I’d been the friend she needed me to be and it seemed that her interest had been perked further not just in Spanish, but also in the possibility of traveling in Latin America. I wondered if maybe that’s something that will be important in her process. That’s just speculation though.

Be that as it may, when I got home from the conference and was reflecting on everything that had happened, I was initially a little disheartened since I hadn’t had the romantic/sexual thing come up that strongly in many years, didn’t think it actually could come up that strongly anymore. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised though. Even though I’ve put a lot of effort into breaking the habit of following the romantic/sexual impulse in all its forms in waking life, it’s still there. It’s also in dreams too, though outright sexual dreams and nocturnal emissions aren’t nearly as common as they used to be. When the romantic/sexual impulse does come up in dreams it’s usually just on the level of feeling and flirting where often there’s the potential for sex later if I can find myself alone with this person. Even these types of dreams aren’t so common anymore, but even if I were able to free my waking and dream life completely from these movements, they could still rise up from the subconscient according to Sri Aurobindo2. What I think it basically boils down to is that until you reach a certain turning point in the yoga these things will always have the potential to rise when given the right stimulus. And with N. I had a very strong stimulus both physically and vitally that was hitting on all cylinders as far as what gets me going sexually and romantically. I will say however that it didn’t get its hooks into me as badly as it has in the past, and I think that’s because of the effort I’ve put into breaking the habit of following that impulse over the course of many years, and also because mentally I understand I’m not going to get any lasting satisfaction from a romantic/sexual relationship.

Now of course it’s good that I didn’t get as carried away with the vital movement as I have in the past, but it seems like the process of getting free of these things is interminable, like the curve of a hyperbola which gets closer and closer to its asymptotes as it extends into infinity but doesn’t ever actually touch them. So what is the turning point? It seems to me it could be different things for different people. For some people it might be something really major like the vital being becoming fully converted and giving itself wholly to the divine instead of the pursuit of its desires, or the psychic being suddenly and irrevocably coming to the front. A letter I recently reread of Sri Aurobindo’s gives me reason to believe though that it can happen in a more subtle way. He tells us:

By constant effort and aspiration one can arrive at a turning point when the psychic asserts itself and what seems a very slight psychological change or reversal alters the whole balance of the nature.3

Now other people might read this differently than I do, but it doesn’t appear to me that he’s describing the psychic being coming completely forward in this quotation. I think what he’s talking about here is a turning point where the psychic being wouldn’t be fully out in front, but its influence would become more powerful than the resistance of the outer nature. Then it would only be a matter of time for things like the complete conversion of the vital, or the psychic being coming irrevocably forward to happen.

However that turning point happens though, you have to carry on with your effort and aspiration until you reach it, and that’s hard. I’m finding in my own case that the vital has become fairly neutral, and while it’s not opposing the sadhana much, it’s not putting its enthusiasm into it much either. It also gets discouraged and I’m finding the only way is to will myself forward despite movements of discouragement and loss of faith. It’s kind of like walking in the desert, and while you come across the occasional oasis, you wonder if you’re ever going to find your way out of it. I hope one day to be able to tell people what’s it like on the other side of that desert.

References

  1. Copyright Donny Duke
  2. ‘When the waking consciousness has renounced the indulgence of the sexual desires and impulses, these take refuge in the subconscient as impressions, memories, suppressed desires and come up in sleep as dreams and involuntary sleep emissions. If the waking consciousness is not itself clear, if, that is to say, though there is no physical indulgence, yet there are imaginations in the mind or desires in the vital or the body, then these dreams and emissions can be frequent. Even if the waking consciousness is clear, the subconscient emergences can still come for a time, but in time they diminish.’ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA Volume 31 – Letters on Yoga Volume 4, pg 526
  3. Sri Aurobindo, CWSA Volume 28 – Letters on Yoga Volume 1, pg 121

Rick Can’t Find Me

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, precognitive dreamsLeave a comment

Recently I was talking to my mom about prevision in dreams, and to illustrate the point I told her the best example I have of prevision from my own dream life. This dream happened in 1999 while I was living in State College Pennsylvania, where I had attended university at Penn State a few years earlier.  My brother Rick, who I hadn’t seen in awhile, was coming to State College with his fiancee to attend some sort of function and planned to stop by my apartment to visit me. The night before his arrival I dreamed that I was in an apartment with one of my roommates, Kevin, and talking to Rick on the phone. He told me “Where are you? I can’t find you.”

The next day I was sitting at home around the time Rick was supposed to show up, and I kept waiting and waiting. I realized something was wrong and then the phone rang and it was my mom who told me Rick wasn’t coming because he misunderstood where my house was and gone to the wrong side of town.  Once he realized the mistake it was too late for him to come see me before he had to be at the function, so he had mom call me and tell me what had happened. We were able to meet up though later at a bar, but as you can see the element of prevision here is obvious even though the details didn’t match up exactly.

It took mom a minute, but she was able to see the connection and of course her next question was how could a dream show that movement in advance. I told her to think of it like a seed and a tree. I explained that one way to think about it is that everything that happens in waking life arises from an inner reality that gives rise to this outer or waking reality in the same way that a seed gives rise to a tree, and so our dreams can show these things in a symbolic way before they happen.

Now mom and I didn’t get into it, but once you understand that prevision appears in dreams the next question is why is being able to see prevision in dreams important? Well on one level it could potentially give a person the ability to act and maybe change something, but prevision in dreams concerning outer events is usually so approximate and so mixed in with other dream elements that I can’t see it until after the fact. There is a type of prevision in dreams though that has more to do with your inner state, that is with movements of consciousness. If you know for example that getting bit by a snake in a dream is indicative of some kind of vital reaction you can be on the lookout for it and I have had instances where dreams like this have helped me to head a vital reaction off at the pass.

More fundamentally though seeing the prevision aspect of dreams as individuals and in the future as a society can help to provide a sort of reversal to our worldview. Right now most of us regard this waking reality as primary, whereas in actuality it’s just the final result of things going on on levels of reality that most of us aren’t conscious of. There’s an excellent passage in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri that explains this:

Our outward happenings have their seed within,
And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,
This mass of unintelligible results,
Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:
The laws of the Unknown create the known.
The events that shape the appearance of our lives
Are a cipher of subliminal quiverings
Which rarely we surprise or vaguely feel,
Are an outcome of suppressed realities
That hardly rise into material day:1

Now in complete candor I’ll admit that this reversal of worldview hasn’t gone any farther in me than an idea, and a fleeting one at that. I do feel though that with the right development the reversal can go deeper and change one’s entire actual lived experience of reality. You have to start somewhere though, and hitching your wagon to ideas like the inner reality giving rise to the outer, oneness etc. is a step on the way. As a society too, evolving towards its own sort of reversal, we’ll have to start with ideas, but big ideas like this coming out into the light of day on a societal level could be what gets us pointed in the right direction even if the actual transformation of society takes a long, long time.

References

  1. Savitri by Sri Aurobindo pg 52

Avoiding Trouble With The KKK

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Inner Voice and VisionLeave a comment
KKK by Arete13, on Flickr
“KKK” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by Arete13

Two nights ago I had this dream about my guitar teacher Tom:

I’m at Tom’s guitar studio and outside in the parking lot there’s a KKK rally happening. Tom is putting on a KKK robe because he wants them to think he’s one of them in order to avoid any trouble.  Then Tom and I  go and sit outside to practice guitar, and a black man comes up and asks Tom if he can go in the studio to use the bathroom. Tom tells the guy no and points out the klanners and says “Can’t you see who’s here?” Tom’s worried the klanners will give him problems if he lets the guy use the bathroom.  The black man just walks in anyway though, uses the bathroom and leaves without incident.

When I told Tom about the dream he laughed and said that was really funny because just the other day he’d told a friend of his he was going to get a Bass Pro1 sticker and put it on his car to give people the message “Hey everyone! I’m a white working class Republican!”  He then proceeded to tell me that in the past when he was going to a lot of concerts and music festivals and the like he put an american flag in his car and saw that he avoided a lot of trouble with police and security that way.

Now I think Tom may have been half kidding with his friend, but we can see via the dream that I picked up Tom’s apprehension and how he was thinking about how he could avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention in what he feels will become a more openly divided and intolerant America after Trump takes office. As Donny pointed out though the dream is probably also picking up on fears of coming intolerance on the level of the nation itself, fear in people that if they don’t go along with the hating herd they’ll suffer because of it. I can also see something of myself in this dream, how I also can put on a false appearance in order to avoid trouble. As an example of this I actually voted for a third party candidate in the election to avoid having to tell my parents (who I live with and are quite conservative) that I voted for Hillary should they ask who I voted for.  I now regret that because I live in Florida where Trump edged Hillary out by a small margin and to be honest in hindsight I feel like I basically cast a vote for Trump by going that route. Now it’s true that I was in fact put off by both candidates and also that I expected Hillary to win the election handily, but I took the easy way out to avoid any possible discomfort at home and didn’t cast my vote for the person who I felt was clearly the lesser of two evils. Now to be fair I think I should point out here that my parents aren’t neo nazis or the sort of people who would show up at KKK rally.  As I’ve pointed out before, dreams often show things in an exaggerated manner to get their point across.

Now the black man at the end of the dream would seem to represent things that myself, Tom and others feeling this collective fear wouldn’t want the intolerant or rigidly moral to see. Donny suggested the idea that the fact that the black man uses the bathroom anyway without incident shows that the future may not play out as badly as people are fearing. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.

Now it’s already implied in what I’ve written but I wanted to explicitly state how this dream shows how we can dream not only about a collective process, but also about what’s going on with people we’re closely involved with such as friends, family, co-workers etc. I’ve been taking lessons from Tom for over two years and we’re of a like mind regarding many things, so we’ve delved a little deeper in conversation than who won the football game last night. Our relationship is to some extent a friendship, and since there’s a connection there I can receive inner communication from him. To see this inner communication is useful if for no other reason than showing our inner connectedness, which Donny discussed at length in a recent blog.

This type of dream or vision can also enable you to see what’s going on with someone in order to try and take some helpful action. That happened recently with me in regards to a friend who’s a recovering alcoholic. I had a vision of her making some objects like large coins out of clay and there was a muse line with the vision that said: Mine was destroyed. At the time I had the vision I was wondering if this person had had a stumble and I was looking online for advice on how to approach someone if you think that’s happened. In my research I came to know of something Alcoholics Anonymous uses called sobriety coins which are tokens showing the amount of time someone has remained sober. After learning that I figured my friend’s sobriety coin had been destroyed figuratively speaking, but the fact that she was making new ones in the vision probably indicated that she was trying to get back on her feet. Having the vision helped me to bring the subject up with my friend and to encourage her not to get down on herself about the stumble, but to just pick herself up and carry on.

This is a pretty vast subject and I’ll probably write more about it in future on this blog, but I think this is a good stopping point. It would be great though to hear other people’s experiences in the comments.

Notes and References

  1. For those who don’t know Bass Pro is a Hunting/Fishing/Camping superstore chain here in the USA.

Can’t Get Rid Of The Zombie

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Uncategorized2 Comments

When I was living in India, myself and two friends, David and Donny, started a kids program for urban village children. That program later evolved into a home for five of those children with us as the primary caretakers. As it turned out I left India when those kids we’re on the cusp of adolescence, but I’ve still stayed involved by funding the project. For most of the time I was in India as well I was funding The Lighthouse, as we called it then (now Harm’s End like the blog), with money that I had.

In addition to the five residents (now three) we also had and still have what you might call an ‘extended family’ of Lighthouse kids that we’re involved with. Because nearly all the kids we were dealing with were from severely impoverished families we were getting asked constantly for money for all kinds of things and not just for the children’s needs. The situation has continued with me in America and I sometimes get emails from Donny voicing someone’s request for this or that. The whole situation hits a trigger in my vital and was a struggle for me then as well as now.  Part of it is selfishness as well as a conflict with the conservative values I was raised with.  As a result I’m pretty tight fisted by nature. Donny is the opposite though and we often found ourselves at odds on the giving issue which created resentment in me towards him and towards the giving in general which was something I sometimes felt was forced on me. This was made worse by the fact that the people we were dealing with would try to play Donny against me in order to get what they wanted. There was also a lot of lying where we’d be asked for money for something, but find out later the money had actually been used for something else. That also created resentment.

Both now and in the past I either decide to give or am convinced to give more often than not it seems, so that really hasn’t changed.  I have mellowed out some though in regards to the giving, see the need for it in some cases, and I’ve gotten a lot better at not getting taken over as much by the feelings of annoyance etc. that come up nor letting the decision about a certain request take over my thoughts.

I still have reactions though to the requests, sometimes big reactions where this unintegrated resentment from the past comes surging up. I had one of those reactions recently when Donny relayed a request to pay for drum lessons from Samuel who is part of the extended family.  I said no since Mugu, a resident, had been asking for the same thing, and would probably have gotten irate at us giving lessons to someone else.  That in itself was a valid point, but as I said the resentment towards the giving came up as well as another source of resentment. Let me explain. Over the years I’ve given a lot of money to Lighthouse kids for this or that class (usually something with getting a job in mind), and I know the way these urban village children will quit things at the drop of a hat if they decide they don’t like it or find it to be too much effort.  And even in the instances where a class was finished, in every case they’ve either not used the education at all or gotten a job with it and quit within a matter of weeks. The hours are long and the pay is crap in India unless you have a lot of education so I can’t not empathize a little, but as you might understand, there’s a part of me that’s really tired of watching money go to waste in the attempts to help these people better themselves.  I figured if history was any indication there was a good chance Samuel wouldn’t stick with the drum class, and it would just be more money down the drain.

So getting back to the story, even after I told Donny my answer, the vital was still miffed about the whole thing, and the mind kept mulling over things such as what I’d say if Donny didn’t drop it etc.  Then that night I had this dream:

I’m in a town and Eli Manning is there as well as a guy who’s running amok.  A car almost runs the crazy guy over, but then some people manage to capture him and put him in an old car like a Model T that has no roof.  I get in the car too as a passenger.  We’re interrogating the crazy guy, and it’s apparent he’s completely nuts.  I finally just get sick of him and throw him out of the car.  I’m glad to be rid of the guy and he’s gone for a while.  Then he’s suddenly back crawling up the outside of the car, but he’s a zombie now. We manage to dislodge him again, but then he comes creeping again up the side of the car.  Somebody suggests we go play a video game about zombies, that doing so might give us a clue as to how to get rid of him.

Shortly after waking up the next day I decided I’d had enough of all this ruling my mind and vital so I made a firm resolution to throw it out.  It wasn’t so easy to get rid of though.  It took quite a bit of work and even though I wanted it gone the thoughts and antagonistic feelings kept coming back as the thing expended its emotional charge. The dream shows this process very well, first with the crazy guy, who represented these irrational thoughts and emotions, and how I threw him out of the car, which shows my decision to throw out the vital reaction I was having. Then we see how even after I’d ‘killed’ the guy, i.e. the vital movement, it kept coming back and this is shown by the guy becoming a zombie that I can’t get rid of.

Regarding some of the other symbols in the dream I have to admit I don’t know what to make of the part at the end about playing the video game, but Eli Manning is an interesting symbol. As any football fan knows, Manning and his team the New York Giants have toppled arrogant quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots twice in the Superbowl, the first time giving New England their only loss of the season. In addition to their reputation for being arrogant, the Patriots are also known for the two times they’ve been caught cheating in recent years. So if you look at the Patriots as cheating jerks with big egos, as many non-Patriots fans do, then you could see how maybe Manning represented some force or movement helping me to throw out the nasty vital reaction that had taken me over.

Another interpretation though is that Eli Manning might represent the nice guy in me since Manning, a two time Superbowl MVP quarterback, always comes across as a humble, well meaning fellow as well as a good sportsman except, of course, for when he was drafted1. The truth is there was part of me that wanted to give Samuel what he wanted because I feel sorry for him. He never stood a chance in the cutthroat Indian public school system and ended up dropping out. The future looks pretty bleak for Samuel, and the Eli Manning part of me wanted to give him something that he might take pleasure in.

So after I’d cleared out the vital reaction the Eli Manning part of me was still pleading Samuel’s case, but in the end I decided that since Donny didn’t voice any objection to my decision I would let it stand and see if Samuel pressed the issue. If he did I figured that might mean it was more than just a fleeting fancy or just arising out of a desire to make noise. Another reason, however, that I decided to let the thing drop at the time was because that I knew after I saw the meaning of the zombie dream that I’d eventually be writing this article, and that would be a chance to take another look at things.2

So in closing, while I think it’s been valuable to go into the nuts and bolts of my vital reaction, I want to reemphasize a really important lesson in this article, which is how these vital movements won’t go without a fight once you’ve let them get in and really take over. The best thing of course is to not let it get to that point, to detach yourself from them immediately if you can and don’t let yourself get fully pulled into the vital vortex. That can be hard to avoid though with things that really get your goat the way this situation did with me.  Once it’s really gotten to you though, the best thing to do, once you’re able to, is make a firm resolution to throw the vital movement out and then be more stubborn than it until it’s gone.

Notes and References

  1. Manning stated publicly that he would refuse to play for the San Diego Chargers should they draft him.  
  2. After proofing the article Donny revealed to me that Samuel had in fact been persistently asking for the class for a while before he finally relayed the request to me. Donny also said that Samuel kept asking for a while after I’d said no, but that he kept telling Samuel the answer was no. When I asked Donny recently if he thought we should give Samuel the class he said he thought we shouldn’t at the moment, because Samuel didn’t seem to be interested anymore, but that somewhere down the road it might be appropriate if he asked again.

 

My Mind Relief From Madness

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Inner Voice and Vision, spirituality2 Comments

About a month ago my mind and vital was in the grip of something. I don’t remember what now exactly, but it was something that had been troubling the  mind and holding it under siege for a couple of days. I wanted to get free of the movement but was having trouble doing so. Then I received these lines from the muse in the morning:

Don’t muddy the mind courts (Came at the end of a dream where I was watching a performance of the hip hop group Run DMC)
My mind relief from madness
Mooning.

The first line’s advice was pretty clear, and motivated me to really try and throw the disturbing thoughts out of my mind, but I was having only limited success. Then all of the sudden, in the evening, I noticed my mind got abnormally clear, and it didn’t take much effort to keep it clear. There was no peace or joy or anything, just a quiet, fairly focused mind. Still it was a welcome respite.

Sri Aurobindo says, among other things, that the moon is a symbol of the spiritual consciousness which is above our normal human mind. One of the main movements in the integral yoga is for the sadhak to not only ascend to this level (or levels I should say) of consciousness, but also for it to descend and transform these lower levels of mind, life and body as well with its peace, silence, light and bliss. So what happened here I think is I got ‘mooned’ by a descent from the spiritual consciousness which quieted my mind and gave me relief from the mind’s madness. It didn’t last and was gone the next morning, but it broke the momentum of the disturbing thoughts, and I was able to move past them. I imagine it was important that, prompted by the muse, I was making a strong effort to throw out the thoughts myself. That I feel opened the door to the descent from the spiritual consciousness.

Now as the reader has no doubt noticed, the first line came at the end of a dream. This is a fairly common occurrence, but I have to admit I often can’t make any connection between the lines that come at the end of a dream and the dream itself. A lot of the time the lines don’t seem to have anything to do with the dream.  Here though I can see a correlation between mud in the mind and hip hop music, which overall has a pretty low vibration, one that appeals to the less enlightened parts of the human vital.

Does anybody else see anything in these lines that they want to share in the comments?

Experience on the Summer Solstice

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, spiritualityLeave a comment

 

I feel there’s a reason why ancient cultures gave such importance to astrological events like equinoxes, solstices, full moons and such things as planetary alignments. Basically they’re days of power, a day you can get a boost for your sadhana or your dream life if you’re receptive. Usually for me, if there’s any effect at all during these times (and a lot of times there isn’t), it’s on the level of dreams. I’ll have a powerful dream or a lucid dream. However during the last summer solstice, which was paired with a full moon, I had a little spiritual uplift that I think was shown in a dream I’d had the night before. The part I’m going to share however is just the end of a much longer dream since it’s only the end that’s really relevant as far as the spiritual uplift that day was concerned.

I put my backpack on and walk down the street and eventually find myself in some woods.  There’s a stream there and in the water I can see these birds, about twenty of them, that have the heads of peacocks but bodies more like an ostrich’s. They’re about as tall as a man and in the dream I regard them as peacocks.  One of them comes up and peers at me curiously though a gap in the trees.  I can see that we’re at a delta where this stream meets the ocean.  I go down into the water which is only about a foot deep and a very beautiful bluish green.  The whole scene is very beautiful as well. The peacock/ostrich birds are moving out into the ocean, and I’m walking with them.  Though the birds are big they don’t seem aggressive nor do they seem to be bothered by me.  If I remember correctly their ostrich-like bodies are black or greyish black.  It’s getting close to sunset and I want to watch the sunset with the peacock/ostrich birds.

One thing I’ve started to notice recently and have shown in a couple of recent blog posts is how a beautiful natural scene in a dream seems to be showing a nice ‘scene’ trying to manifest inside you in your waking life that day or a day or so afterwards. I believe that was the case here. So let me tell you what happened. On the day of the solstice, in the late morning, I went for a ride in my kayak. While I was out, I encountered one of my favorite water birds around here, a roseate spoonbill, roosting in a mangrove tree. I don’t often see them when I’m kayaking so I just sat there for a while admiring the bird and its beautiful pink plumage. When I returned home I noticed I felt cleared out as I often do after a spin in the kayak, since I can get fully immersed in nature. I noticed also that my thinking was elevated, and I found myself naturally pondering some things I’d recently read by Medhananda and Nolini Kanta Gupta and was looking at the world through the lens of those ideas. It didn’t require any hard mental effort or tapasya though. It was just happening naturally and spontaneously. For the most part I can’t remember exactly what I was reading at the time, but I do recall one little aphorism by Medhananda that was on my mind:

Spirit is tremendously solid.
It is like diamond.
In comparison
matter is only a cloud
of probabilities.1  

A little later I took our dog Rosie for a walk. As we walked I was really feeling the stillness in the plants, and while that’s not a common experience for me it wasn’t the first time that’s happened, and I’m sure a lot of people have felt the stillness in plants. This time though, I could also feel the joy that was in the plants, and I caught it a bit by contagion and was feeling joy inside me as well as I walked. I was also appreciating how beautiful and unique the plants were, seeing them the way you might when tripping on psychedelics but to a much much lesser extent. There was one group of plants I encountered that were nothing but huge leaves on stalks which had been planted to hide a fire hydrant. When I looked at those plants, there was something so delightful about those big leaves that I couldn’t resist the urge to go over and touch one, giving a little laugh as I did so and feeling delight similar to what I think a small child does when they do something like that. That delight continued on the walk, and the uplift continued after that. It might have still been there a little bit when I went to bed. I honestly don’t remember now. It wasn’t there the next day when I woke up though.

So what I think happened here was I was able to open to the amplified energy that was available that day and benefit from it in this altered state of consciousness, which was foreshadowed by the beautiful sunset scene in my dream. This idea that a beautiful dream scene is symbolic of a beautiful uplift in waking life is still a working hypothesis for me, but one I’m getting more and more evidence to support. Recently, I had another dream where I was looking at a beautiful blue lake ringed by breathtaking mountains on the far side, and two days later there was a definite shift in consciousness in the evening, a state of peace and quiet. It wasn’t as strong as other experiences like that I’ve had, but it was definitely there.

One thing that I feel is important to point out is the beauty of these dream scenes is beyond the greatest beauty you can see in the physical world or even in normal dreams. I can’t really explain it any better than that, but if you start to have dreams like this I think you’ll see what I mean, see that it’s a certain class of dream or has a certain type of dream substance that can embody that beauty. It might be a glimpse of what Sri Aurobindo calls the subtle physical, but I can’t say for sure.

Regarding the peacock/ostrich birds in the dream I should point out that Sri Aurobindo has said that a peacock is a symbol of spiritual victory and that fits with the fact that I had a little spiritual opening. The fact that the rest of the body was like an ostrich is interesting since the thing that most quickly comes to mind when I think of the symbolic meaning of an ostrich is sticking your head in the ground. If I’m remembering correctly that the color was black that would indicate a hostile force. So I’d guess the element of spiritual victory is still marred by an element of sticking my head in the ground and maybe also a hostile influence. I think the birds in the dream were also connected to the encounter I had with the roseate spoonbill even though the dream birds were completely different. I always enjoy the sight of a roseate spoonbill because pink is the color that symbolizes the psychic being or soul in the integral yoga.

So in closing I think it’s important to try and keep yourself clear every day and not just on days like full moons and solstices. Knowing, however, that you can get a little boost on days like that is a good motivator for keeping yourself clear especially on those occasions.

References

  1. On the threshold of a new age with Medhananda, pg 165 by Medhananda

Your Horsemen Are Already Here

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Dream Interpretation, Dreams, spirituality1 Comment
me coming in door
photo: Dhina

Your Horsemen Are Already Here

Our dreams are scattered not only with the present and past, but also the future. That’s usually hard to see until the thing predicted happens, and even then you have to be able to interpret the symbols of the future in dream to see it when it does manifest. I’ve done dream work on four continents, in many different cultures and religions, and I’ve seen it over and over. In my nonfiction story “Behind the Mask Jerusalem, the Journey of a Thousand Tongues”, posted on my personal blog, I give a very clear example of a dream of the future that is cloaked in symbols, since dream is from our creative reflex and doesn’t usually say anything outright but tells a story of the story that will manifest at some point in waking reality, usually quite soon, but not always. About three weeks ago, however, I had a precognitive dream that wasn’t hidden in symbols, and though it wasn’t an exact rendition of the waking reality event, it was close enough to have no doubt it was precognitive dreaming, and even before the event occurred, I was waiting for it to happen. It did last week.

I dreamed I was in my room, and a person came in and told me someone very special to me was at the door, that they’d brought them, some close relative I hadn’t seen in a long time. I went into the living room of my apartment, which was a little different than the one in waking reality, and at the door was Midhun, my one and only yoga student, who had moved to another city about a year ago. When I saw him there was a dream shift, and the scene changed, as though the piece of ‘dream ground’ he was standing on wasn’t dream but waking reality, although there was a glow to it, and that glow was his presence, like it was actually him standing there. I was surprised to see him, and we hugged, and when we did I started to become lucid but woke up before I did.

About 2 weeks after the dream I was in my room, and someone came in and said someone had come to see me, was at the locked gate downstairs waiting to be let in, and it was Midhun, the person telling me that knowing it would be a surprise, and I’d be happy about it. I sent someone down with the key, but it took some time, and so I went out to open it myself, but there he was at my front door exactly like he’d been in the dream, and we hugged and had a short but fruitful three hour visit.

Now, I’d sent him a Facebook message a few days after my dream telling him about it. He’s in school and a teenager, and his parents don’t want him traveling here alone, why I haven’t seen him for so long. You could say my telling him the dream made him come, but he came on family business, something that happened on the spur of the moment, though he probably took the opportunity given him to come when it finally presented itself. In any event, the conscious power behind dream knew that opportunity would come, and the events of the dream itself were an obvious rendition of waking reality, making it such a clear example of the future in dream.

A dream connection like that we don’t just have with anyone. I’ve been in his dreams for the past three years, and he in mine, my muse too, and it was dream that brought him to me to begin with. For reasons I relate elsewhere, my function on the spiritual path is not to do the usual and become a teacher, and so I don’t accept students. When he showed up at my door the first time he wanted to talk to me about superpowers. He was 14. I laughed and talked to him a bit and sent him on his way. Then he returned a few days later and told me of a dream he’d had where I was his teacher. I explained again I didn’t accept students. Then he came again telling of another dream where I was his teacher, and I refused again, though I told him a couple of stories I tell the young people here, what had brought him to me to begin with since he’d heard about it. But he was persistent, and the next time he came I’d had a lucid dream about teaching him, and it’d come up in my muse, and so I agreed, but I told him I wouldn’t be his teacher, just his coach, and that the teachers would be The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, who my teachers are.

He advanced rapidly, too fast, and in a short time he was having lucid dreams and inner contact with deity, vibration in the heart and head, a little of the inner voice, and by the time he left he was having out of body experiences, but I didn’t focus him on those things. I was giving him the tools to find his soul and God. By that time he was being pulled into trance in the late mornings in school, and he was experiencing changes in his consciousness, and it scared him a little bit, and just when he learned not to be afraid, his family moved unexpectedly to another city. Obviously he needed time to assimilate all that he’d learned, and so the conscious power behind reality arranged for that to happen.

Even though I told him I would only be his coach, in practice I became his teacher, and that’s a relationship on the level of soul when it comes from within like it did with both of us, and so the connection between us in dream in very strong, as evidenced by the precognitive dream being so close to what happened in waking reality and the realness of his presence in the dream. We don’t hear about these kinds of precognitive dreams very much because the dream connection has to be quite strong, and they happen more in private I imagine, like between spiritual teachers and their students.

I will close by saying that, although for all practical purposes I’m his spiritual teacher, I’m still ‘coaching’ him to the real teachers, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and as for the future, I think I’ve shown that, not only the future of our relationship (that there’ll be more inner connection and outer meeting), but also that the future is here among us already if we can but see it. Dreams are the most readily available portal for that, and you’re actually seeing it often and just don’t realize it. When, however, you have a dream like I describe here, and it comes true, you begin to.