This is a powerful report, TJ, and thank you for all of the rich details. I think there are many histories that we are drawing upon in our dreamscapes and sometimes we touch an alternate way of knowing. And there is a timelessness also that we can somehow recall. We know without knowing how we know.
This mytho-poetic capacity is what the mental-rational-theoretical rides upon. A healthy mental structure can be open to these liminal zones without getting stuck in them. I get this idea from that wonderful book on the Axial Age you mentioned previously.
I imagine that we are already touching the interior spaces of those future people who will not be speaking English or Chinese but will have found the capacity to tune into the logics of our becoming. I imagine we are creating conditions through our social dreaming that will make these kinds of shifts actualized. It is a vibration, a resonance…we know without knowing how we know and I suspect a lot of good historiography has emerged out of these irruptions from inner space. Perhaps new operational chains are being rehearsed?
I also sense there is some of the Kripal influence in this multi-layered dream. I imagine if more of us took the trouble of paying attention to these liminal zones and making the effort to give a good report to others who are receptive that we could derive a great benefit. We might start to flip out of the materialist shadow our culture is currently stuck in. We can tap into that imaginative wisdom. You are starting to build an impressive argument!
I think this is a sign of a new civilizational capacity becoming embodied from the field of many possibilities. This is perhaps what Gebser and Sri Aurobindo were pointing to in their visionary explorations. We can cultivate, as they did, a Vision-Logic.
I want to add another dream to the archive we are collecting. Twenty years ago I had a lucid dream, in which, I was kneeling on the ground, with a three year boy in my lap, and standing on my right side, with his hand on my shoulder was an eight year old boy. We were dressed in a red Chinese garments, a feeling of ancient China, and in a very aristocratic setting. We were looking out the window and there was a garden and a gentle breeze lifted fine curtains and the light was exquisite, as if it was coming through a prism. I knew without knowing that the children were mine and I was the father and they were very refined children, highly intelligent. I could feel that I was in deep silent rapport with the children and I addressed a question to the intelligence behind the dream," Is this from a past life?"
And a male voice said, from above my dreaming body," Why are you not content with being loved?"
I felt that the voice was giving me a gentle rebuke, and coming from a much deeper place than my question was. I learned that I don’t need to fit these experiences into a linear form that makes sense with a narrow frame of reference.
And that scene seems to come from a deep time. I speculate that we Moderns are perturbed by these depths and need to let our notions of time and space be re-configured. A future people will have better access to these experiences and will be much more able to relax into them without getting swept away into amnesia or grandiosity. In our current Neo Liberal make a fast buck society, there is no reward for virtue.
And as we pay attention to our collective unconscious our collective unconscious changes…
Blockquote[quote=“johnnydavis54, post:22, topic:3198”]
A future people will have better access to these experiences and will be much more able to relax into them without getting swept away into amnesia or grandiosity.
[/quote]
“There is no reward for virtue in our Neo Liberal world”. This is something I stress more and more as every morcel of sheer opportunism under the guise of “Virtue” gets thrusted into my conciousness. The rastafarians call these people “Baldheads”, purveyors of a perceived virtue, while “Dread”, prophets, priests, true virtue. What happens when virtue fails to entertain the real. Really-existing leftist politics don’t seem to interest me much, if not at all, because they more than appear doomed to repeat their historical failures. So how do we rekindle the isolation/lack of percieved innocence of a pre-globalized world, to enrich our particularisms so that we can address things meta/universally. I personally, don’t find much interest in democratic global government because it appears doomed to the same libertarian/anarchist dilemma of appealing to the caprices of a powerless world. A powerless world, is an utterly incoherent one. So if powers are globally secured as undemocratic multinational corporate communities, how do we undergo a new modality towards universals if this is the really-real precondition for a new globalism? My idea is we need to parse out, in a way which transcends this postmodern muck, which are universal concerns, and which are akin to particularism.
And that meta-message is conveyed in many different ways from across the political spectrum. I don’t sense that anyone is in charge, and politicians can do a lot of harm but none of them seem to be capable of doing any good. Electoral politics, as some astute person said, is like wiping your ass. You hope to keep the fascists out. But I am not too cynical as I don’t think this system has ever worked for that many people and I never had great expectations. I muddle on through with the little bit that I had and have braved many disappointments. I have always felt like a refugee in my own country. That there is wide spread malaise is a good sign. There might be a willingness to create some experiments. Everyone seems to be eager to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. There is a lot of freezing up as people notice that the house is on fire, or the boat is sinking or whatever your metaphor for disaster is. But many of us have endured a great deal and that may have taught us something that we can draw upon in this twilight zone that we are entering now. It is a metaphysical smorgasbord. I always have a pen and paper next to the bed and jot down my dreams upon awakening. I have done this since I was a teenager and it is a practice that I have enormous faith in. And I have faith in almost nothing else. Only the imagination is real. I hope we can share what is most imaginative about ourselves as our political culture collapses. As we see these big cracks opening up in the psyche we may have some pleasant as well as unpleasant surprises. Trickster is alive and well. There is always a wobble before the crash and then something interesting happens. I am open to believe without being too gullible that there are vast capacities that many of us inhibited as were busy hustling in a dying system. I have a huge mound of dream journals to sift through. Some of it is lunatic, and some of it, a small fraction, quite visionary. I imagine there is a visionary in each of us if we sponsor one another. So, let us pay attention to what we are paying attention to. A joint attention can be very powerful. That is what the arts is good at. Maybe the beginnings of creative operational chains happen in that nap in the afternoon, that reverie that you share with a friend, or that glimpse of something as you listen to the radio or watch an old movie. It probably won’t happen at Harvard Business School as they seek restlessly for the ultimate algorithm that will then allow them to colonize us and the entire solar system in the next thousand years. Right now I have taken up a renewed interest in quantum mechanics. Some of it is crazy! We are a hologram. That old New Age cliche is starting to make sense to me.
Let the parsing begin! I think we can parse and be visionary at the same time.