Dreams: The Ancient Stories We're Still Telling
" I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old."
Psalm 78
Welcome to Vessel of Dreams, a chalice of nocturnal visions, a weekly blog on the concoctions of myth and metaphor which disturb our sleep. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi thought of dreaming as "the workshop of evolution." Certain evidence suggests that consciousness itself incubated in nocturnal visions and insights, and it is well known that dreams reveal things so hidden in the unconscious we wouldn't be aware of them at all if they didn't shock us during a nightmare. The workshop of evolution. If ever we needed a healthy dose of progress, it is now.
The Greek word "apocalypse" means "unveiling." In ancient society, it described the moment the bridegroom lifted the red veil and saw the face of his bride for the first time. Today, when marriage is no longer a secret, it suggests a wider learning: what happens when the veil of our illusions and civilities drops and we see ourselves complete: the dark as well as the light.
It's hard to see darkness and light at the same time. We want to be the good guys. We want to sweep our mistakes under the rug. It's much easier to blame others for what's wrong with the world than to do the work of growing to maturity. Indeed, we inhabit a culture which for all its lip service to "growth industries," actively resists growing. Corporations disrupt. We want to stay forever young, handsome, potent. We want money, sex and power. But the more we become a society of winners and losers, a meritocracy we call it, which is just another form of finger pointing, we become divided against ourselves, and a house divided cannot long stand.
Divisions spawn a dualistic outlook. Death opposes life. Men oppose women. Whites oppose people of color. Republicans oppose Democrats. Fear opposes love. Control opposes intimacy.
Nature gives us an image of the world divided in the Grand Canyon.
On the upper right, a plateau covered in green like the gentle surfaces of civility moves toward a fissure, a rent, a tear in the fabric of mountains, heaping layer upon layer of sediment, each a tantalizing hint of a geological age from the Kaibab limestone at the top, which is only 2 million years old to the Pre-Cambrian rock at the bottom, which at nearly two billion years old is half the age of the planet.
It's kind of like the Fool in the Tarot deck, setting out with his dog on life's journey, oblivious that he's cruising for a bruising.
Returning to the canyon, if the earth is here divided, both sides tell the same story, but the sides cannot see themselves, they can only see the Other.
Fools that we are, we cannot see that we're all in the same story, no matter upon which side of the political and cultural divide we happen to stand. What unifies the sides is flow. At the center of the divide a river runs. My twelve-step friends say you can't find the way up until you've gone all the way down. From the bottom you can see it all.
Geologists say the Grand Canyon was carved over eons by a shallow sea expanding, contracting, eroding, leaving fossils and sediments in its wake. Not all divides, however, are natural.
On the left, a Ghanaian gold mine has created a canyon as well, earth split open for the purpose of extraction. Like the so-called "meritocracy," industry disrupts for reward. But even here, both sides remain part of the same earth, and the poor are every bit as essential to the story as the rich, perhaps more so, since, like the river, they can see both sides from the bottom.
As George Lucas aptly reminded us, the same force can be used for light or dark purposes, and conflict tends to be fiercest between people who are more alike than different. In words few of us like to hear, Adolf Hitler said he learned everything he knew about racial hygiene from the Americans.
That's not what I want to be, so I blame the Western will to power, the demagogues who call for Crusades while blaming Islam for being violent, and we get nowhere.
Dreams, on the other hand, come in the service of health and wholeness. They help me to name and understand my conflicts, they provide images from my own experience to clarify that experience. They give me ways in which to acknowledge my hates and loves, make peace with the dead, glimpse the future, forgive the past.
A friend recently remarked that even in the twenty-first century, we remain enthralled by two ancient philosophers: Plato who imagined an unseen perfection of archetypes and Aristotle who read the book of Nature in all its magnificent particularity. Waking life is mostly Aristotelian, while the Queen of the Night speaks the archetypal language of Plato.
NEXT WEEK: Archetypes and how to recognize them.
I will utter dark sayings from of old."
Psalm 78
Welcome to Vessel of Dreams, a chalice of nocturnal visions, a weekly blog on the concoctions of myth and metaphor which disturb our sleep. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi thought of dreaming as "the workshop of evolution." Certain evidence suggests that consciousness itself incubated in nocturnal visions and insights, and it is well known that dreams reveal things so hidden in the unconscious we wouldn't be aware of them at all if they didn't shock us during a nightmare. The workshop of evolution. If ever we needed a healthy dose of progress, it is now.
The Greek word "apocalypse" means "unveiling." In ancient society, it described the moment the bridegroom lifted the red veil and saw the face of his bride for the first time. Today, when marriage is no longer a secret, it suggests a wider learning: what happens when the veil of our illusions and civilities drops and we see ourselves complete: the dark as well as the light.
It's hard to see darkness and light at the same time. We want to be the good guys. We want to sweep our mistakes under the rug. It's much easier to blame others for what's wrong with the world than to do the work of growing to maturity. Indeed, we inhabit a culture which for all its lip service to "growth industries," actively resists growing. Corporations disrupt. We want to stay forever young, handsome, potent. We want money, sex and power. But the more we become a society of winners and losers, a meritocracy we call it, which is just another form of finger pointing, we become divided against ourselves, and a house divided cannot long stand.
Divisions spawn a dualistic outlook. Death opposes life. Men oppose women. Whites oppose people of color. Republicans oppose Democrats. Fear opposes love. Control opposes intimacy.
Nature gives us an image of the world divided in the Grand Canyon.
It's kind of like the Fool in the Tarot deck, setting out with his dog on life's journey, oblivious that he's cruising for a bruising.
Fools that we are, we cannot see that we're all in the same story, no matter upon which side of the political and cultural divide we happen to stand. What unifies the sides is flow. At the center of the divide a river runs. My twelve-step friends say you can't find the way up until you've gone all the way down. From the bottom you can see it all.
Geologists say the Grand Canyon was carved over eons by a shallow sea expanding, contracting, eroding, leaving fossils and sediments in its wake. Not all divides, however, are natural.
As George Lucas aptly reminded us, the same force can be used for light or dark purposes, and conflict tends to be fiercest between people who are more alike than different. In words few of us like to hear, Adolf Hitler said he learned everything he knew about racial hygiene from the Americans.
That's not what I want to be, so I blame the Western will to power, the demagogues who call for Crusades while blaming Islam for being violent, and we get nowhere.
Dreams, on the other hand, come in the service of health and wholeness. They help me to name and understand my conflicts, they provide images from my own experience to clarify that experience. They give me ways in which to acknowledge my hates and loves, make peace with the dead, glimpse the future, forgive the past.
A friend recently remarked that even in the twenty-first century, we remain enthralled by two ancient philosophers: Plato who imagined an unseen perfection of archetypes and Aristotle who read the book of Nature in all its magnificent particularity. Waking life is mostly Aristotelian, while the Queen of the Night speaks the archetypal language of Plato.
NEXT WEEK: Archetypes and how to recognize them.
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