The other day, after a long hot day at work, I went out into the backyard just before sunset and lay on my back to rest a little. I was chatting to my partner about my day and not really taking notice of my surroundings. Then as I gazed up at the sky, I suddenly became aware of the exquisite beauty of the cloud formations above me. Multiple balls of small fluffy white clouds were arranging and rearranging themselves across the arc of the sky, yet I couldn’t see them actually moving. As the sky filled up my senses I felt myself come into relationship with it, as if the sky too was aware of my awareness of it. In this dreaming space I experienced the veil of separation drop between ‘me’ and ‘it’. It seems to me that this experience of interconnectedness is always available if I allow myself to be open to it.
So I’ve been thinking about the veil between everyday life and the otherworld. Is this separation between worlds a human construct or something unrelated to humanness? How much do our social paradigms shape our understanding and experience of reality, so that even our neurobiology, let alone our beliefs and values, serves to block, or grant access to a more expansive interconnected way of being, to dreaming reality…
If separation is a social construct, do we therefore have the power to reconnect? Is the dreaming something we have access to all the time? But even pagan and traditional Indigenous cultures that live/d with more interconnectedness between worlds and ways of being seem/ed to favour retreat from the everyday world in order to go deeply into the otherworld…
Perhaps the veil serves an important role to keep us humans alert in a world of sabre-toothed tigers, in the flesh and blood world of consensus reality? In which case, ritual offer us a safe place and time to enter deeply into the dreaming. A time to stop, loosen up our hold on everyday life, become the tiger…. And in so doing, maybe we change consensus reality…
Whatever the reason (and I could let go of trying so hard to understand and explain this all to myself haha :-) -- I love that I can move between worlds. It is a practice I come back to often, but also stray from, forget about! Life becomes dreary and I feel trapped until I remember again. It only needs to be a few minutes sometimes. But the practice of it needs nurturing. So I’m looking forward to Steph’s Smokey Nights, to make space and time to set some intentions and open to the dreaming of 2023!
The other day, after a long hot day at work, I went out into the backyard just before sunset and lay on my back to rest a little. I was chatting to my partner about my day and not really taking notice of my surroundings. Then as I gazed up at the sky, I suddenly became aware of the exquisite beauty of the cloud formations above me. Multiple balls of small fluffy white clouds were arranging and rearranging themselves across the arc of the sky, yet I couldn’t see them actually moving. As the sky filled up my senses I felt myself come into relationship with it, as if the sky too was aware of my awareness of it. In this dreaming space I experienced the veil of separation drop between ‘me’ and ‘it’. It seems to me that this experience of interconnectedness is always available if I allow myself to be open to it.
So I’ve been thinking about the veil between everyday life and the otherworld. Is this separation between worlds a human construct or something unrelated to humanness? How much do our social paradigms shape our understanding and experience of reality, so that even our neurobiology, let alone our beliefs and values, serves to block, or grant access to a more expansive interconnected way of being, to dreaming reality…
If separation is a social construct, do we therefore have the power to reconnect? Is the dreaming something we have access to all the time? But even pagan and traditional Indigenous cultures that live/d with more interconnectedness between worlds and ways of being seem/ed to favour retreat from the everyday world in order to go deeply into the otherworld…
Perhaps the veil serves an important role to keep us humans alert in a world of sabre-toothed tigers, in the flesh and blood world of consensus reality? In which case, ritual offer us a safe place and time to enter deeply into the dreaming. A time to stop, loosen up our hold on everyday life, become the tiger…. And in so doing, maybe we change consensus reality…
Whatever the reason (and I could let go of trying so hard to understand and explain this all to myself haha :-) -- I love that I can move between worlds. It is a practice I come back to often, but also stray from, forget about! Life becomes dreary and I feel trapped until I remember again. It only needs to be a few minutes sometimes. But the practice of it needs nurturing. So I’m looking forward to Steph’s Smokey Nights, to make space and time to set some intentions and open to the dreaming of 2023!