Everyone dreams, but few people find sufficient interest in their dreams to move beyond mere curiosity at their strange contents. Even many who work with dreams as a part of a transformative practice usually concentrate on their content, and only more rarely question their form, ontology, and origins. Exploring these aspects, however, can help provide a context that helps orient dreamers to some of the esoteric underpinnings of dream etiology (their meaningful origins), and can help enliven dream-based transformative practices. This article is an attempt to show how a spiritually-oriented understanding of the makeup of the human being gives a context for understanding different types of dreams, their origins, and some associated consequences for dreamwork.
The language of spiritual science, also called anthroposophy (human wisdom) will be of help in this endeavor, because it maintains its cogency across multiple phenomenal realms (such as those of sleeping and waking), and because it has as its aim the ability to make clear and coherent processes which work within the physical realm but have their source beyond it, in the spiritual worlds. Fundamental anthroposophical terminology will not be explained in this article for reasons of space, and neither will the basic anthroposophical view of dreaming in general. For a brief introduction, I highly recommend that readers peruse this article: Sleep and Dreams in Anthroposophy, which provides the context (more…)
I would like to say that the quite frankly astonishing rise of social-networking tools clearly points to an unmet need in the ‘wired’ populace at large. We increasingly live in a fragmented society, where our friends and family are scattered across the globe. Many of use no longer, for economic, personal, or many other reasons, choose to live in the same place for our entire lives, where we could build up a local network of family and friends. And even if we do so, the demands of modern life and our cultural habits tend to erode (it seems) many opportunities for face-to-face gatherings over a long time period; such things now require real effort and are not a de facto part of everyday life.
So it seems that a way of assuaging the erosion of the human need for contact, and just as importantly, a context within which such contact can be meaningful, can be found through the social networking tools. These tools are not designed, and cannot really take the place of repeated face-to-face interactions, but what they DO provide is a way to ‘keep the door open’ to people who you might otherwise lose track of or only communicate with very rarely. By having, for example, a Facebook page, you put yourself in a position of taking moments out of your day to have a conscious connection with people who would otherwise likely not enter your thoughts that day. The immediacy and digital ‘nearness’ provided by the technologies allows for and creates a different kind of interaction than has heretofore been possible on the planet. On the one hand, these technologies constrict certain kinds of communication; but it opens up others at the same time, and allows a thread of connection that can later be followed up by a more present, face-to-face, or otherwise soul-ful type of communication.
This is something of the positive side of these tools, but they can also be used for pure ego-stroking, for bullying, for economic reductionism, etc. Such is the way of any tool. For me it’s always a question of how the tool is used, and I am convinced that humans have the power to make tools like this (and other technologies) work in a positive way for the benefit of themselves and the planet.
It’s true: there is no substitute for real face-time. I would simply point out that Facebook and such tools are NOT actually substituting for face-time. In fact, the reverse might be true: the immediacy and ubiquity of social networking tools may actually increase the potential for two or more people to get together IRL (in real life)–there must be a study on this somewhere… if not, any takers?
My feeling is that the use of such tools lessens both perceived and actual gaps between individuals, while also allowing individuals to discover more potential relationships that might otherwise be missed. Increasingly human beings are going to have to learn how to deal with the instant availability of essentially infinite data. In the pre-wired-era, the available data was restricted to your immediate sensory neighborhood, and you had no choice about this, notwithstanding the influence of books and letters. Now, we have a choice, and can access a whole variety of types and fields of information literally out of thin air. It opens up a whole different set of possibilities for human creativity and interaction….
But obviously I’m not yet giving a well-rounded picture. I should also point out that the way that these technologies lead human consciousness around may be problematic in a number of ways, and the identification and harmonizing of these regressive or sclerotic tendencies should be addressed up front. But to speak of these would require an even longer discussion — one including talk about the inner life of the soul.
Below: a diagram depicting connections between a single user’s Facebook friends.
Our experience of ourselves is in many ways completely mediated by aspects which are located beyond the normal boundary of the “I”. I’d like to offer one possible way of looking at the issue.
I approach this question concerning the boudaries of the “I” by taking into account the transformations of the “I” as it works through and within the physical body and the soul body on its path from death to life to death to life. To do so requires distinction between the ideas we have about our “I” and our unmediated, direct experience of our “I”, and more importantly between our “I” and what we can call our ego, on the basis of the usage of this term in the Western traditions (particularly psychology, which deals almost exclusively with the ego).
When incarnating, the human “I” experiences a period of darkness, which only gradually lifts throughout life, until (perhaps around the age of 21 or so) the first glimmerings of what I am referring to as the “I” become available to the experience of the ego, which is a structure that is present much earlier on, and is built up through a variety of relations between the burgeoning activities of the physical/soul bodies and the ‘outer’ worlds.
The incarnation of the “I” takes place not at birth, but much later, and sometimes not at all; this despite the fact that we each have the constructed ego that is constantly built up as a semi-permanent dialog between the inner activities of the body/soul and the various bodily and ensouled elements of our environment. This ego includes the remnants of the activity which is rightfully regarded as the spiritual activity of the “I” – thinking. Thus the ego becomes filled with thoughts but lacks the awareness of whence these thoughts originate. In the meantime (in accord with all the social, cultural, historical, familial, etc. ‘forces’ at work around all the activities of the aspects of the human being which are not the “I”) the ego maintains the false impression that it is the one doing the thinking.
This then leads us to the question about how we draw the boundary around what we consider to be our “I”, which turns out more often than not to be a question to the ego about the ego. There are no boundaries to the “I” in the normal sense, the “I” is a spiritual activity, a process. It is a wonderful aspect of the spiritual world that “I’s” are capable of penetrating and moving with each other; their activities can merge, coincide, and diverge. The idea of boundaries of the “I” only arises when we take our experience of the rules at work in the realm of physical bodies and our sense life and apply them to an arena in which no physical bodies or physical sense organs exist. In other words, it is like asking about the flavor of a trapezoid.
We can have ideas, thoughts about the boundaries of our ego, but the activity upon which such ideas are based rests only in the “I”. We can have the thought “My physical body only works because it includes trillions of bacteria and other organisms which I do not directly experience, but which science tells me are required for my process of digestion; if these microorganisms did not permeate my gut, I would be incapable of digesting my food.” This leads us to the thought that perhaps I’d better take a look at what I consider to be my ‘self’ – shouldn’t it include all the aspects necessary to maintain the activities of my physical body, which support then my capacity to think and experience?
We can thus, in our thought-life (not our thinking-life) come to the idea that the normal drawing of the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is in some ways quite spurious. There is then an attempt to fill the gap thus created (in thought) with other thoughts, which try to reorganize the connections made in thinking. So we say things, perhaps, like “Well, yes, ‘I’ really must include the bacteria in my gut” and so forth.
But all the while we are missing the very activity that is the source of all of these reconfigurations of our thought-life; our thinking. It is when we turn our attention to the thinking process itself that we start to come directly into contact with the “I” itself. This experience, the recognition of the “I” by the “I”, is not a thought, but is what can occur when thinking takes itself as its own object. In such a case, a completely different set of experiences become possible with respect to the question of the ‘boundaries’ of the self.
Moreover, what our ego keeps hidden from consciousness directly affects our perceptions and assumptions. It seems that the ego, in a sense, precisely constitutes its boundaries by this very omission. What I feel coming from my ego changes dramatically from situation to situation, not on the basis of what is included so much as on the basis of what is left out, and what’s more, on how it is left out.
The ‘mood’ around the process of the ego’s self-entrainment says more about my deeper nature than its explicit self-identifications ever could.
There are some things about creativity that have been on my mind. I have been trying to hone in on the qualitative experience of the creative moment… what does it feel like to be creative? What kinds of qualities distinguish the feeling of being creative from other types of feelings, like the feeling of ‘producing’, ‘innovating’, and so forth? What makes a creative moment creative?
It seems to me that in the experience of the creative moment, there is always a place where knowing runs out… where consciousness finds itself in a state of openness, as if surrounded by space. In particular this feeling seems to be accompanied by the sense that the normal boundaries of the ego are loosened, expanded/expended, but not yet replaced or filled with anything. This is specifically true with respect to the actual genesis of the creative activity, while during the activity this sense can be replaced with a feeling which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called ‘flow’.
In every case that I can think of (for myself, that is), creative moments are states of being characterizable by a sense of potential, of a sort of future-coming-into-the-present — but notably always without knowledge or specific anticipation. It is a very hard state to even think about because it seems that thinking itself — at least in the normal, ego-centered thinking of much of daily life — is suspended, as if in the air. And even in thinking ‘about’ the creative moment, there is almost a lacuna of consciousness around the creative moment itself, as if consciousness met a border that it could not cross with its normal configuration… so I have the feeling that it is as if some part of consciousness travels ‘underground’ or perhaps ‘above’, into the ‘sense of awaiting’ that permeates the surrounding ‘space’.
You can see that the normal tendencies of speech have a hard time when applied to a moment which seems to transcend encapsulation. One usage of languge serves to delineate, define, demarcate, depict, circumscribe, form, or otherwise pinpoint (alchemically this would be representative of the Earth element). My initial questions are, in a sense, Earth questions, with language leading towards and assuming this Earthy aspect. Yet by its very nature the object of the inquiry is perhaps unable to be Earthed – so I find a contradiction even in the asking of the question. Thus a paradox: if it were possible to actually describe in words the qualitative essence of a creative moment, the creative moment itself would necessarily remain undescribed, even de-described.
Therefore some questions:
Is language as evocative rather than descriptive enough of a tool to allow thinking about creativity to proceed?
Do all creative moments share some specific qualities, perhaps at a meta or meta-meta-level? Or is it impossible for creative moments to be bound at all by any possibile prescription?
With respect to the individual experiencing a creative moment, what kinds of processes occur qua the experienced sense of self/other? That is, what happens to the sense of self in such a moment?
Related: Are creative moments ever something that can be ‘mine’ in the same way that I can speak about (a perhaps naive) experience of ‘my’ pain, ‘my’ thoughts, and so forth?
Also related: To what extent do ‘others’ play a role in creative moments that ‘I’ experience?
Lastly: If we were seers, able to perceive the activities of the spiritual worlds, how would we describe what is experienced by a single human being in a creative moment?
Everyone dreams, but few people find sufficient interest in their dreams to move beyond mere curiosity at their strange contents. Even many who work with dreams as a part of a transformative practice usually concentrate on their content, and only more rarely question their form, ontology, and origins. Exploring these aspects, however, can help provide a context that helps orient dreamers to some of the esoteric underpinnings of dream etiology (their meaningful origins), and can help enliven dream-based transformative practices. This article is an attempt to show how a spiritually-oriented understanding of the makeup of the human being gives a context for understanding different types of dreams, their origins, and some associated consequences for dreamwork.
