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January 2009

This Month's Contents: Liberated from Yourself by Bob Cergol | All of Me by David Weimer | Uber Dream Analysis by Eddie Traversa | Video - Images of Essence | Humor

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Editor's Note
by Shawn Nevins

 

Another year of dreams stretches before us....

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Liberated from Yourself, by Bob Cergol

[The following is excerpted from an email exchange]

I remember you—though I didn't know you very well.

I'm not sure what someone would see in my eyes. Knowing who and what you are isn't going to "fix" life for you. My life is full of irritations—but all that—along with my character—is "out there"—with the rest of experience.

You will not be able to reason your way "through" to liberation. At best, you'll just be able to keep your mind busy until you can come around to accepting just what the intimations about life and yourself you've been experiencing imply about where you stand in all this—and that you cannot now accept.

It took me the last two years—after I got my answer—to understand that one of the main roles of the guru is to serve as a bridge. By that I mean, someone onto whom you can project that which you cannot accept. Did you ever have an experience of a feeling of eternality around [Richard] Rose? I did, as did many others. I always ascribed that experience and feeling to him. I was not prepared to accept the implications of the experience so it was good to be able to have a personality onto whom to place it.

This experience of seeing life as a dream that you described—your point of reference is still as the dreamer of the dream. In other words it was the same self-centered, ego-centric point of reference you had when you were living in Rose's house asking him for his teaching at the end of a long workday as some sort of servant whose purpose was to enlighten YOU. Except that the inner man was actually getting through the wall of ego-identity.

You might actually be close except that it probably didn't occur to you that you too were a phantom in that vision of your loved ones and relatives. That is what no one accepts. If you too were a phantom—then what is left of you? Where does it leave you—with your hopes for liberation. Who is there to be liberated and what does it mean?

What does [Franklin Merrell-] Wolff mean by "Consciousness without an object?" The answer to that is Realization.

You want liberation for you. Perhaps liberation comes when you are liberated from yourself. You cannot be liberated. You are the very experience of attachment—to everything in the field of consciousness. Something which has no life of its own cannot be liberated.

I'm not trying to pose as a teacher here. The truth is my circumstances do not afford me the time to see if I can get inside your head from reading a few paragraphs, and then to carefully consider what to say that might help.

All I can tell you is that it is the denial of death which is the final block. I see my path as depicting almost twenty years of turning my head away from facing what Rose transmitted very, very early in the relationship. It took him leaving the picture for me to no longer be able to use him to hide. (People believe in death and then deny it. I don't believe in death. There is nothing to die.)

Perhaps you could try to go back to that moment of intense feeling/seeing of life as a dream—not to re-visualize it—but to use it as the launching point to look directly at that which you didn't want to face in that moment. Where does that urge you mentioned come from, i.e. "I realized I wanted to live..."

I wish I could be of more help...I am willing to attempt to hold the mirror up to you to the extent that I am able—but you will have to take the lead.

Best wishes,

Bob

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"All of Me" by David Weimer

"All of Me" I think I'm never going to die Although I know I am. Sometimes when I think this, I am overwhelmed with feeling how profound life is. Walking in the radiating asphalt parking lot under the burning star, My shoe sticks to a blob of gum; I smell spearmint and drag my foot, leaving streaks on the black. I look around at others in the area outside the store; I see the sky, I notice cars, I see lawnmowers in a row. Then I slip back into the pool of forgetfulness. My life cycles like this. I wish.. I remember times as a young man, as a boy; I remember being more present, then, to life. I remember walking in the woods after smoking, while smoking, looking up at trees. I was alive. I have nostalgia now of then. Going into the bathroom of the Eat 'n' Park restaurant after leaving the home improvement store, I wake back up, it seems. I sit in the stall, on the seat, listening to the music coming from the speaker over my head. I trace with my eyes the same wood grain patterns that I traced the last time I was here. I sit there, remembering being awake before; I listen to the music and identify with it. Then I'm back in my work van after walking the parking lot and unlocking the door and settling in and Turning the ignition, putting on my seat belt, putting the gear selector in drive, moving out, merging into traffic, driving to wherever I am going. I hope that I will have time to think about this when I am an old man. I hope that I will have hours on end to sit-lay in a folding reclining lawn chair in the shade on a sunny day. I want to think about many things with time to spend on everything. I want to lose myself in this some day. Maybe I will get there, to that place. I hope so. When I grow up, what will I be? I wondered a long time ago; What was I? I may wake up to ask at the end. I want to be home and to travel to somewhere new every day. I want to live and I want to die. I want it all.

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Uber Dream Analysis by Eddie Traversa

At one point in my life I was really into dreams a lot. I still have a bit of an interest there, but not as much as I once did.

I used to use this a lot with counseling clients and have adapted it for spiritual purposes. You probably have not heard of this technique before, but it's the best dream interpretation technique I have come across and almost always tells you something about the dream and in turn you, since you're the dreamer.

It's very good at uncovering different layers of the dream. So let's see if you find it useful.

The first thing you need to know about dreams is that the very first line of your dream tells you what it is about. So let's assume that this is a first line of a dream.

I am traveling to a purple house.

That line there will tell you what the theme of the dream is, but the theme is hidden, it's not really at that surface level of interpretation that most people would use. For example, people would think about travel or change in direction or moving to a new house or something like that.

That may well be a correct interpretation at a surface level, but a dream always is layer upon layer upon layer of meaning. And almost always has multiple meanings. So let's provide a technique to get into the more hidden and deeper stuff.

If we look at the first line of the dream again;

I am traveling to a purple house.

We want to take the key symbols from that sentence out. In this case we would have:

I or possibly even I am
Traveling
Purple
House

For each word write down 6 to 10 words that you associate with the word, try and make them the first things that come mind rather than something you give a lot of thought to.

For example if we use house as an example, here are a few words that come readily to my mind:

Sleep, comfort, relax, garden, bath, safe. List these next to the word house.

Do the same thing for each symbol.

Now say each association out loud. Don't say it in your mind, physically speak the word. As you're saying each word, watch your body for any reaction. If you twitch suddenly, if yours voice croaks, if you have some difficultly saying a word, or if you have an emotional reaction to a word no matter how small make a note of it. It's the words that create a reaction of any type that you want to keep. The rest can be discarded.

You may have to do this a few times to get yourself really focused on your body and emotional states. That's ok, the more you practice the easier it will become.

So let's assume that I had some form of reaction to comfort and safe for house. Let's also assume that I had some reaction to some words like explore, movement for traveling. And some reaction to the words who, me for the word I.

We then have these words to play with:

Comfort, safe, explore, movement, who, me.

You can also throw them around a little on paper.

Who me explore comfort? Safe movement and so on.

So one of the deeper themes of the dream then is about exploring things in safety and comfort.

Then look at its opposite side. If the theme of the dream is about exploring things in safety and comfort look to some of the opposites.

Think of the word safe and think of some opposites to that, e.g. threatened, fear etc. What ever pops into your mind.

Do the same for each word of the theme.

You should nearly always end up with a positive theme and a negative theme. So that at one level the dream is about safety or comfort but at another level it's also about fear or feeling threatened etc..

Now you're starting to get a lot of the deeper hidden meanings of the dream out in the open.

Then go on to the next line of the dream and do the same thing. See how the theme of the next line relates to the first. The more of the dream you do in this fashion the more crystal things will become. Just to be clear on this, the first line tells you what the dream is about, the rest of the dream builds on that first line or first theme if you like.

If you find things aren't really clear on the first run through, then go deeper into the symbols. For example, in our little example, take the words for house: Sleep, comfort, relax, garden, bath, safe and write 6 to ten words for them and start the process again.

You could go on forever and forever like this, but usually one or two iterations are enough to get the hidden meanings out.

It nearly always works in helping to get stuff into the open in terms of dreams.

When it's in the open you have it in psychological consciousness. Then you start negating the inherent concepts so that the technique becomes a spiritual negation technique.

For instance let's say the dream turns out to be something like a fear of being outside a comfort zone, then you can really go to town on that and challenge that fear.

Who is afraid? What comfort zone? Etc. Do that till nothing is left in terms of energy for the dream and you have negated a pretty big unconscious belief you had about yourself.

This technique also works on daydreaming or visions in meditation.

Some points to remember: don't get to caught in the obvious, for example many may say that the color purple represents spirituality, but it's also the color of bruises. So at the end of the process you may just want to reflect for a while on the images that the theme of the dream brings into mind.

BTW I made the name Uber Dream Analysis up. I really don't know what the technique is called as it was passed down to me by a very wise and talented counselor.

Another great dream interpretation technique is Carl Jung's Active Imagination technique. You can do a search for that on Google; it's worth doing if you're into dreams.

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Video: Images of Essence

If you don't see a video clip above, then go directly to YouTube.

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Reader Commentary:

I just want to thank the whole organisation, and particularly those guys who have shared and continue to share their experiences – the fact that they are all unpretentious, unassuming and very down-to-earth people demonstrates their genuineness.
~ W. - Australia