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!
Important dear Penny I adapted plans to current circumstances (see above) ... The smoky night journey is designed and will then probably be launched next year. In the meantime, we will invite to a vision crafting the 8th of Jan at 6pm (CET). This falls in the middle of your night. We might think of a second CET-morning slot, if you and some people are interested?!
And on the other side, I would love to somehow demystify these shifts of realities and say I believe we all have continuously access and we did not learn to be aware. It happened often as a child to me that people said ... hey where are you ... because they could see that I was somehow disconnected in a different world. It took me a lot of time to recognize this as a talent or resource.
yes, I think children have much more access to dreaming reality. The world is such a fascinating place and hasn't yet been defined. One of my favourite pastimes as a child was swinging as high as I could, leaning back and looking up into the sky! It's nice to remember that.
Then so many of us experience an education system that pulls us out of dreaming. Such a crime against our nature! Interestingly, (and not surprisingly) then as teenagers there is a strong pull to experiment with alternative realities. I certainly did.
I have always thought that the holy grail would be awareness of all realities at the same time, all the time. Less about disconnecting from one to be in another but a multi-realitied way of being. I think that's what 'enlightenment' is meant to be. But the path to enlightenment seems like hard work (!!), though for some people it seems to happen spontaneously. Those rare glimpses of interconnectedness I've experienced in my life keep me thirsting for more. But why do I fight it so much?? Dominant reality is highly addictive, seductive....
Yes, consensus/everyday reality is a powerful trance (in the sense of being the one and only reality) and even I love so much to catch night and daydreams, it happens to me again and again that I get caught into this mainstream trance. It is times I am very efficiency driven, I do not remember my night dreams and do not find the magic flirts and stories around anymore, my creativity dries out. One of my favorite books as a child was Momo from Michael Ende ... do you know that masterpiece, dear penny? I think children should read it to all us adults regularly ;)
I'm thinking about connection and disconnection. Whether we need to disconnect from CR to access the dreaming, or if it's a strategy we have learnt, or even just a natural response in a world socialising us to split realities.
Yesterday, I was listening to a radio program about the value of the way children see and experience the world. One child said that at school she would drift off from listening to the teacher and then 10mins later, think, 'what was she talking about because I wasn't here!'. She said, 'it just happens, I can't control it'. I remember doing this all the time in school. I hated being cooped up in a classroom! Daydreaming is how I stayed connected to my dreaming self. To my sense of self really. But I think we are forced to split ourselves off from an early age rather than be multi-dimmentional. Which is why so many of us search to reconnect.
I just want to pause and acknowledge the deep grief I feel about this....
Dear Penny, thank you so much, I love how you share the delicacy of the veil between and the beauty of moving between realities. You opened a new perspective for me in it all, to also see an advantage in the separation, and the creation of somehow special places and moments for the 'dreaming'.
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!
Important dear Penny I adapted plans to current circumstances (see above) ... The smoky night journey is designed and will then probably be launched next year. In the meantime, we will invite to a vision crafting the 8th of Jan at 6pm (CET). This falls in the middle of your night. We might think of a second CET-morning slot, if you and some people are interested?!
And on the other side, I would love to somehow demystify these shifts of realities and say I believe we all have continuously access and we did not learn to be aware. It happened often as a child to me that people said ... hey where are you ... because they could see that I was somehow disconnected in a different world. It took me a lot of time to recognize this as a talent or resource.
yes, I think children have much more access to dreaming reality. The world is such a fascinating place and hasn't yet been defined. One of my favourite pastimes as a child was swinging as high as I could, leaning back and looking up into the sky! It's nice to remember that.
Then so many of us experience an education system that pulls us out of dreaming. Such a crime against our nature! Interestingly, (and not surprisingly) then as teenagers there is a strong pull to experiment with alternative realities. I certainly did.
I have always thought that the holy grail would be awareness of all realities at the same time, all the time. Less about disconnecting from one to be in another but a multi-realitied way of being. I think that's what 'enlightenment' is meant to be. But the path to enlightenment seems like hard work (!!), though for some people it seems to happen spontaneously. Those rare glimpses of interconnectedness I've experienced in my life keep me thirsting for more. But why do I fight it so much?? Dominant reality is highly addictive, seductive....
Yes, consensus/everyday reality is a powerful trance (in the sense of being the one and only reality) and even I love so much to catch night and daydreams, it happens to me again and again that I get caught into this mainstream trance. It is times I am very efficiency driven, I do not remember my night dreams and do not find the magic flirts and stories around anymore, my creativity dries out. One of my favorite books as a child was Momo from Michael Ende ... do you know that masterpiece, dear penny? I think children should read it to all us adults regularly ;)
I'm thinking about connection and disconnection. Whether we need to disconnect from CR to access the dreaming, or if it's a strategy we have learnt, or even just a natural response in a world socialising us to split realities.
Yesterday, I was listening to a radio program about the value of the way children see and experience the world. One child said that at school she would drift off from listening to the teacher and then 10mins later, think, 'what was she talking about because I wasn't here!'. She said, 'it just happens, I can't control it'. I remember doing this all the time in school. I hated being cooped up in a classroom! Daydreaming is how I stayed connected to my dreaming self. To my sense of self really. But I think we are forced to split ourselves off from an early age rather than be multi-dimmentional. Which is why so many of us search to reconnect.
I just want to pause and acknowledge the deep grief I feel about this....
Dear Penny, thank you so much, I love how you share the delicacy of the veil between and the beauty of moving between realities. You opened a new perspective for me in it all, to also see an advantage in the separation, and the creation of somehow special places and moments for the 'dreaming'.