The power of the unconscious mind to anoint and guard the conscious mind is as old as the human race. In the ancient past we have known how to hold and nurture this power, how to keep it close and keep it fulfilled. In return, the power has responded with healings and guardians and ancient spirits to stand by us in our times of need and to bring us great joy.
This power exists within each of us as potential. It is the greatest power of the universe because it exists within as a Being Within who functions to consciously unite with us so we become Heavenly Partners, creating an eternal individual. But the power has been diminished and occulted over time by the spread of civilization.
Pushed more and more into the background by technological advances, the power ceases to exist, leaving us no choice but to look to the Ego at the seat of the conscious mind to guide us out of these chaotic times of survival struggles and disillusionment. But what we seem not to realize is that the times have almost always been chaotic and we have always looked to the Ego for guidance. Thus, throughout history, the chaos compounds and confounds us and war never ceases. The Ego runs rampant as though possessed by some madness. It is missing its partner, the thing that keeps it balanced and sane.
As we feel loss of control over our lives and our environment, we seem also to have lost even the path to the reason why. As this cultural revival of the Dark Ages continues, we group together in churches to pray and in globally organized events intended to help and heal our world, such as Ritual of the Portal. It gives us relief and a sense of purpose that we are actively doing something about this absence of personal and group power by taking up the reigns ourselves and trying to bring about a global awakening and enlightenment. But unless we address the inner division first, we cannot hope to heal the outer world in any sustainable way.
Our planet stands now as a great and tragic metaphor of our division within, the distance between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind becoming as a chasm over which we are desperate to ascend. Our ascension efforts, carried out through traditional and historical methods of group prayer or through our various New Age spirituality attempts, are missing the mark, the effect being failure, because an important component is absent that would bring us success. There can be no ascension until the disparate parts of ourselves that are scattered chaotically throughout the conscious mind are brought into alignment with our perfectly organized, but wildly misunderstood, unconscious mind.
The achievement of this alignment and its consequent rise of planetary resonance involves the kind of lightwork that is frightening because it necessarily involves darkwork. Diving into the unconscious mind in attempts to connect with it and even comprehend this incomprehensible power invokes colors, images, voices, sounds, aromas and other psychic phenomena that are little understood and certainly not supported as normal or natural by modern psychology. The social suppression and even ostracizing of people who do this, most famously the Swiss psychologist Carl Yung and less famously many of the rest of us, stands as a warning to us to avoid this scary path. And as long as we avoid it we are condemned to have that dysfunctional relationship with it.
The relationship of avoidance of a core part of our being is a kind of insanity that we are willing to live with and failing to recognize. Yet all around us we can see its manifestation in the events of our world that seem both strangely familiar and incomprehensible to us. The idea that we must lose our minds in order to gain our sanity is a paradox, yet in paradox lies truth. Paradox, the long forgotten plural for paradise, is exactly what we must strive for if we are to bring about a better world in which to live. Even if we do not believe we can change the world, we know deep down within ourselves that we can change ourselves, and if enough of us do it, then the world will change. And deep down, deep within, is where we must go to do this.
The unconscious mind is the Psyche, which is the spirit, mind and breath of life. The Psyche awaits our arrival and yearns for it. As Carl Yung famously wrote, "What I am saying is this. The Psyche is real!" The goal of the Psyche is the purification of the self, and until we recognize, acknowledge, and unite that part of ourselves, then nothing in our lives will ever change. This requires on our part the putting aside of social programming, modern psychology, useless ideas, the misguided need to monetize everything, and even the people in our lives who would stand in the way of the union. A guide is required until the Psyche appears in the life of the individual and takes over as guide, because no one and no organization can lead the individual in the evolution of their consciousness like the Psyche can.
Even as we consciously distance ourselves from the Psyche, let us thank the moon for ensuring that we cannot completely disconnect. At night, when the planet turns away from the sun, the moon follows and shines upon us its reflected light that holds within it the power of transformation. As the moon pulls us back to the depths of our beingness in sleep, from out of our dreaming mind come shapeshifting forms strange to us, forms that seek us out even as we turn away in fear. Sometimes, we project the idea of them out into our waking world as angels and other times as monsters, where we can deal with them in some rational way. But if we were to embrace those forms as our own, we would find a new world waiting, one filled with hope, caring, kindness and love. This is the world we seek to bring the planet to, but this world does not exist for the purposes of a planet that, ultimately, can take care of itself. This moonlit world exists solely for us, for our own evolution of consciousness, and by going deeper into its mysteries and allowing its shadowy embrace we can experience the return of the powers.
When we delve deeper into the unconscious mind we are as swimming in the ocean. On the surface are the waves of the ocean that wash over us in perfect rhythm, one after another and so predictable. These waves of waking consciousness inform us that all is normal, all is well. But far beneath these waves swim the sea creatures and strange monsters of the unconscious mind, so familiar to us and so misunderstood.
Everything on the surface seems logical and rhythmical, while everything below seems to lurk in patternless motion. On the surface we create a patterned world based on timetables, nine to fives, and monthly bills. But down below no such parameters exist, so of course we are uncomfortable there as no one and nothing seems to be in control.
When we encounter creatures of the unconscious mind we do not recognize them or understand them because they are mutable. They change shapes and identities, like watery citizens of the vasty deep Atlantis. While they are mutable, we are fixed and thus are more comfortable with the predictability of the sane conscious mind than we are with the unpredictability of the insane unconscious mind. And of course, we know we are not supposed to embrace insanity.
But we forget one important thing or perhaps we just choose to ignore it. The sane and rhythmical waves of our ocean are responding to a distant power that we also do not understand. The gravitational pull of the moon is the governor of the waves of the ocean and also the governor of the unconscious mind. So we cannot escape whatever it is we think we are escaping by ignoring the depths below as we must also ignore the depths above. And those creatures down below in the unconscious depths of the sleeping mind, where we must visit every night whether we like it or not, are also responding to the powers of the moon. Our consciousness is linked to the moon in ways we do not understand and never will unless we simply acknowledge that it is so, and then seek to discover the connection.
But Ego has created its own tool, modern science, to deny such connections exist. From the perspective of modern science, all such connections must be empirically provable and if they cannot be, then they are dismissed as fantasy so that the Real Fantasy can continue. In the Real Fantasy, the celestial bodies, the planets and moon, are just casually floating around up there, as unconnected to us as are the creatures of the unconscious mind, while we sit in the middle in the catbird seat, masters of the universe.
As long as the Real Fantasy governs our thinking, we will never understand what in the world is going on and even what we are supposed to be doing in the world, besides fixing breakfast, going to work, coming home and watching movies. We love movies because they pull us out of ourselves, like the moon pulls the tides, and they allow us to explore all these lost connections and misconceptions within the safer context of entertainment. Our attraction to movies is not only about the fun of watching them but also about their technology. Movies work by projecting images with devices, and projection is something we are very good at, even if we don't know it. If it turns out that we really are masters of the universe, it will only be because of one simple, incredibly complex, skill we have. We are masters of projection.
Can it be possible that those strange, mutable creatures, the population of the unconscious mind we encounter in dreams, are actually projections of our conscious mind? Suppose for a moment they are. Does a two-way street exist? Are things outside of us actually projections of our unconscious mind? If we are projecting forms both inside and out, what is their relationship and what is their purpose? How do our projections become so real that we do not recognize them at all, as though they exist in a life of their own?
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?
Glendower: Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the devil.
Hotspur: And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth. Tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!"
(Shakespeare, Henry IV)
Consciousness is the greatest mystery there is because the universe and consciousness are different expressions of the same Thing, one with form and the other formless. But the other reason it remains such a mystery is because of the world of dreams. When we are awake we engage upon introspection as the way of making the self responsible for what we are experiencing in the environment. "It's all my own doing." "What is going on and how can I change it?" "What if I do this, what will happen then?" "If I change my attitude then everything will be better." But when we sleep we do the inverse, we engage upon projection as a way of making the environment responsible for what we are experiencing in the self.
If we have muscle aches while sleeping we might explain to ourselves what is happening by dreaming we are in a doctor's office getting a massage that's causing the aching. Or, if we have a headache we might dream we are in combat somewhere and getting injured in the head. If we are restless in our sleep we might dream we are being bothered by some creature or some such explanation to ourselves of what's going on. It is impossible we can deduce something in dreams like "my legs hurt" or "my back hurts" and make a conscious statement to ourselves while dreaming as explanation of it. Dream consciousness isn't capable of that kind of critical thinking, except to say "I am dreaming," but instead forces us to think in terms of explaining to ourselves what is happening by projecting a dream environment in which we are involved in something that is causing whatever we are physically or mentally experiencing. In this way, dreams help us with our mental health.
Also, the dream events occur one after the other over a period of time like in real life, but it's an illusion. They seem linear but really they aren't; it's just that our conscious experience of them makes them seem linear. There is the famous example from Carl Jung's case of the man who had an extensive and intricate dream of being an aristocrat in the French Revolution, plotting against the rebels, getting caught, going on trial, getting sentenced to death, being taken to prison and finally being taken to the guillotine and getting his head chopped off as a way of explaining to himself why his head hurt when the picture above his bed fell and hit his head as he slept. Jung used this dream as an example of how dreams seem linear and lengthy but really aren't.
Thus, our unconscious minds masterfully manipulate time as a handy tool while we dream, and our conscious minds surrender to the rules of time when awake. When we dream we transfer those rules via some mental processess into our dreaming reality. Against time we are helpless except when dreaming, when we are Masters of Time. Space also has power over us except when dreaming.
Dreams are perhaps a sudden creation in a burst of consciousness, and inside that burst are all the elements of the events, like a rain drop full of subatomic particles or pictographs inside a spiral, that we sort out with our conscious mind and make connections from one to another so that geometry is formed and the dream projection created and the events seem to occur. The application of consciousness in a sorting endeavor makes the events seem linear and helps them make sense. Is this what we are doing in life? Are we experiencing the rain drop of the "eternal now" as a linear series of events because of the application of our consciousness in a sorting endeavor to make sense of our reality?
By dreaming, we square ourselves with reality, and it's satisfying. We can control what happens, we are the masters of reality in dreams and that's important because the reality is that we were born into a pre-existent world. But at night we relax into the opposite way of experiencing it, of projecting our environment and creating our world, as a release and a creative expression, and we are refreshed for the next day of waking consciousness in a world not of our making.
It is a condition of life that we come into a pre-existent world, or maybe it only seems that way and is, in fact, the ultimate mystery of consciousness, and we bring with us into this reality the essential consciousness tool - alternate world of dreaming - a kind of shovel that can dig us out of our "stuck" condition. Dreaming helps empower us into believing we can change the world more to our liking, bring it closer to the Ideal World that we intuitively seek. Through dreams we gain inspiration, mental refreshment, and the will to cheerfully continue on to the ultimate reality of certain death, guarded along this dimly lit, shadowy path by Shadow Breakers who we may or may not see.
We only came to sleep
we only came to dream
It is not true
no, it is not true
that we came to live in the world
We are changed into the grass of springtime
Our hearts will grow green again
And they will open their petals
But our body is like a rose tree:
It puts forth flowers and then withers.
(Aztec Hymn, 5th century C.E.)
If the Aztec were right, that we only came to sleep and dream and not to live in the world, it opens the mind to other mysterious dimensions of consciousness and it raises many questions. Where did we come from and what kind of being are we? What is our indwelling pattern that dictates our purpose to come here to dream but not to live? Is living and dying the price we pay to gain the experience of dreaming? Why can't we dream in our normal existence? What kind of being are we that cannot sleep and dream but nevertheless needs to? Is the entire physical world our species' projection just so we can come here and dream?
And finally and ultimately, if all this is true, that we create this world just to come here to sleep and dream in it, then why do we conceal from ourselves this knowledge of who we are and what we do and where we come from? Perhaps we know that to gain full benefit of living the life that happens between birth and death, we masters of the universe deny ourselves the knowledge of the illusion of mortality we are projecting.
Projection or not I am mortal but I know of a place where I am not, which is why I say I regret that I have but one life to give to my pillow :)
Claire Grace Watson, Shield Guide
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