An excerpt from . . .
A Path of Dreams
Mystery lies at the heart
of the universe
and it is expressed
in symbol and ritual.
Kukai (774-835)
In the Beginning
When I was a very young child, I was told that God created the world and all that it contains. Immediately, I asked what I thought was an obvious question: “Where did God come from?” I was not satisfied with the answers that I received to my question and I felt that I must puzzle this out for myself. I reasoned that if God was the creator of all things, then God must have been created by His/Her God. I visualized God in His heaven and, further up in a still higher heaven, the God of God.
This was still unsatisfactory, as I did not know where God’s God had come from. Over and over again, I visualized a long chain of Gods, each the creator of the one just below Him, until, exhausted, my mind would explode into emptiness. This explosion into no thought was both a disappointment and a relief. I was often occupied with my chain-of-Gods practice, but it always ended in the same nothingness. Feeling weary, I would go back to playing with my dolls.
When I was 14 years old, my family moved to Japan. As I made the voyage aboard ship from San Francisco to Yokohama I had no idea that I was embarking on a vision quest. In the Native American or Indian tradition, a young person of the tribe is initiated into adult life through the ritual of a vision quest. He engages in an ascetic spiritual practice that culminates in a vision of a numinous animal or other spirit guide that gives the candidate inspiration and direction for living life. It is a time of confrontation with the deep unconscious on both the personal and transpersonal levels. It is a time of fear, terrible awe, and ecstasy.
During the two and one-half years my family was living near Tokyo, I was intentionally isolated from the Japanese culture that surrounded me. It had been less than twenty years since the end of the Second World War and it was still standard US military policy to discourage cultural or social interaction between US citizens living in Japan and the Japanese people. We lived on a military base and, each day, I was transported by school bus from my home to an American high school that was about ten miles away. It was during these frequent bus rides that the luminous image of my vision quest appeared.
About half way to my school there was a high, steep hill with stone steps that led upward and disappeared into the trees. At the base of this stairway was a simple torii. This Shinto torii (sacred gate) and the path that began beneath it stirred my heart. Sitting on the side of the bus that would allow me to see it for the longest time possible, I watched eagerly each day for it to appear. At the time, I could not have explained my attraction, but now I would compare the feeling to that of darshan, the blessing that flows spontaneously into one who glimpses someone or something sacred.
It was not only the form of the torii that held my imagination so forcefully, but also the narrow stairway that began beneath it and ascended steeply to something unseen and unknown. I sensed that this torii was a gate to something holy and utterly apart from my everyday life. I deeply yearned to climb those stairs. Unconsciously, they were connected in my mind with the staircase of Gods from my childhood. That stairway had always exploded into nothingness. Perhaps I felt that, if I could reach the very top of the actual staircase outside the bus window, the mystery would be revealed. I might come face to face with the God of all Gods. Of course, this possibility was as terrifying as it was compelling.
In Japan during the years of my girlhood, I was never able to climb those stairs, nor any like them. The shrines and temples, except in special situations, were “Off Limits” to us as military dependents. Overall, this was probably a good policy. Americans were often ignorant of the religious and cultural customs that would have made our visits harmonious and respectful. Still, these restrictions left me with a sense of longing for something that seemed strangely familiar. It felt as though some unknown thing I had searched for over ages had been denied me, just at the time when it had finally entered my vision.
That simple torii, with its stairway, was my puberty vision, and an unconscious equivalent of the Native American vision quest. For me, it was a path leading to the empty fullness of God’s face. Throughout the decades that followed, those images remained always in my mind.
At about the time of my 17th birthday, my family left Japan and returned to California. One day, a young Irish Catholic priest knocked on our door and asked if there were any members of our family who were Catholic. Talking to us cheerfully from the doorway, he looked young indeed, and very new in his role as a missionary to the Americans. His sincerity was obvious and I was touched by his willingness to knock on the doors of strangers in a strange land.
Although no one in the household was Catholic, this priest invited us to attend Easter Sunday Mass at his small nearby church. His appearance at that particular time renewed my interest in religion. While in Japan, I had not met any of the Shinto or Buddhist priests, but I sometimes saw them on the streets and I was always drawn to them. Of course, both lack of a common language and military policy made any real encounter between us nearly impossible.
Formal religion was not an important influence in my family, so my own spiritual interests were viewed as somewhat peculiar. Yet, if my parents did not especially encourage my spiritual exploration, neither did they discourage it. When I was 11 or 12, my family sat together watching television. We saw a film called “The Song of Bernadette,” the story of a 19th century French girl who had seen visions of the Virgin Mary. I had never watched anything like this film before and I was deeply moved. At the end, I turned to my father and asked, “Is that true?”
His answer to me was, “You will have to decide that for yourself.”
After the Catholic priest had gone, I thought about his invitation and decided to attend Mass on Easter Sunday. From this serendipitous beginning, my interest in Catholicism grew. Initially, it was the beauty and mystery of the liturgy that attracted me and, after I began to study deeply, the theology and philosophy also appealed to my heart. I was baptized Roman Catholic when I was 19, taking the baptismal name Bernadette, and practiced that tradition exclusively for many years. Interior prayer, as taught by the 16th century Discalced Carmelite mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, was an area of special study and practice for me. Such methods of prayer, and the personable Carmelites themselves, are still very near to my heart.
Finding a career was much more difficult than discovering a religious path. After several aborted tries, I found the psychology of C.G. Jung and, most particularly, dreamwork and Sandplay Therapy (Founder: Dora M. Kalff). Feeling at home in the world of symbols and archetypal images, I settled gratefully into my chosen profession. Twenty-seven years after leaving Japan, I had a series of dreams. As a Jungian therapist, I was very accustomed to remembering and working with my own dreams, as well as the dreams of clients. I thought of the unconscious as a deep, dark cave that was filled with gold and precious gemstones. Dreamwork is a method of mining what is hidden in subterranean darkness and bringing it to the surface and into the light of consciousness.
Dream interpretation involves a process of making associations to the dream images, discerning the correct association, amplification of dream content, interpretation of the dream symbols, and an honoring of the dream and dreamwork process. Dreams often compensate consciously held attitudes and opinions by presenting to the ego awareness the opposite or complementary standpoint. Such a process, directed by the Self, tends toward a wholeness or completeness of the personality. The Self, in Jungian terms, is the central archetype of totality and is the aspect of Mind that moves us toward our greatest wholeness or enlightenment. In Buddhist terms, we might refer to the archetype of the Self as the Essential Nature or Buddha Mind.
Since I had been
tending my dreams for many years, I had developed a certain relationship with
the source of dream images known as the collective unconscious. The information
that comes to me through dreams repeatedly proves valuable for my life in the
everyday world and as guidance on my path of Spirit. I trust the dreamwork
process and the vitality of the new viewpoint it brings to awareness. Images in
dreams are most often interpreted symbolically. They are rarely to be
understood in a literal way. The symbols represent aspects of the dreamer’s
personality that are partially or fully unconscious. In looking at our dreams,
we use a variety of methods to see into our situation and ourselves. Of course,
there are also more transpersonal dreams.
The word transpersonal means trans (across) and personal (from persona or mask) or, to cross beyond the mask. When something is transpersonal there is a commonality to the image or content that transcends the particular or individual and moves into the realm of universal understanding or experience. A transpersonal dream image is not only applicable to the personal psyche of the dreamer, but is recognized by the great or shared psyche of all beings. The image has much the same meaning to everyone and is immediately grasped as a representation of our common experience.
In the field of psychology, much has been made of dreams. Analytical psychology has very refined and detailed methods of dream interpretation. Dreams are made up of personal, cultural and transpersonal content. The personal is valuable for the growth and interior work of the dreamer himself, but the cultural and transpersonal elements have a larger scope and sometimes a universal application. There is a distinction between personal or housekeeping dreams and what are sometimes called, so simply, big dreams. Big dreams contain archetypal images and information that move beyond the boundaries of the individual personality and cross over into transpersonal and transcultural realms. Such dreams can sometimes be of value to persons other than the dreamer herself.
Apart from analytical psychology, dreams have an ambivalent reputation. They are often spoken of disparagingly as something untrue and unclear or as ephemeral images of transience. They are sometimes used to illustrate the world of samsara or of ungrounded fantasy and are often dismissed as phantoms of the night. They can be seen as images that are totally unrelated to the real world. Yet, others say it is the “real” world that is the dream.
Dreams are sometimes heralds of important events as when Queen Maya dreamed that a white elephant entered her side on the night that the Buddha Shakyamuni was conceived. Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary, was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt with his wife and her newborn son Jesus. The Japanese priest Myoe was guided throughout his lifetime by his own rich dreams. Kukai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism in Japan, is said to have had a dream that led to his discovery of the Mahavairocana Sutra and the beginning of a journey to China from which he would return as the eighth patriarch of esoteric Buddhism. One might say that the efficacy of the guidance of dreams is another image of the Buddhist middle way. Dreams are empty and yet they are not empty. They are unreal and still they are real. They are untrue and also true.
A dreamer is a conduit, a momentary vessel that gives form to the content of the deep unconscious and allows it to manifest in the conscious world. She is like the length of hollow bamboo that is an integral part of the shishiodoshi or sozu found in many Japanese gardens. Slowly the length of bamboo fills with water and, when it is heavy and full, it bows toward the earth and releases the water with a characteristic clack. The water is reunited with its source, the pool or stream, and so completes its movement from the undifferentiated source, through form, and back to the source. As with the bamboo, the value of the dreamer lies only in his capacity to be hollow and empty. His hollowness provides a temporary containment, or reed of form, for the process of movement from formlessness through form, and back to the source. A dreamer provides the differentiated container that allows for a conscious manifestation of previously unconscious material. As with a woman who is with child, a dreamer is a temporary vessel for something that is striving to appear in the world.
The source of the water and the place to which it returns are the same. Yet, there has been a transformation. The change is that, for a little while, the bamboo acts as a conduit to give form to formlessness and hold it in awareness. What was unknown and unconscious becomes seen and known. A dreamer is like the bamboo; she is bounded, hollow emptiness. It is an emptiness that is pregnant with the seed of all possibilities.
As with the sozu, the time of the release of a dream depends on its cycle of fullness or its ripeness to fall. It is not my usual practice to speak of my dreams. Yet, the men and women of wisdom in my life have gently prodded me into the understanding that there is a ripeness to this time that allows these dreams to be released, through the awareness of each of us, back to their source. Even their assurance would not be enough, if I did not feel an inner imperative to let them drop, through the bounded bamboo consciousness, into the collective stream.
These dreams are my dreams, but I have slowly learned that my dreams are not only my dreams. My dreams are your dreams. Not in an undifferentiated, pre-personal way that dispenses with boundaries, but rather in a transpersonal way that recognizes the oneness of all that has being. The personal or particular is of great importance and is sometimes at the cutting edge of the work of awareness. Yet, at some place beyond the personal, perhaps you and I are not so separate. In mind there are endless images. These images cannot be the exclusive property of anyone. An image surfaces through one person or another and, as at the birth of a child, we all look with wonder at the new being that is present in our world. A dream, like the birth of a child, can change the course of a lifetime. These dreams have changed the path of my own journey on our small, blue planet. Please read these dreams as your dreams and this journey as your journey. You are the wanderer in me and my life’s myth, as I also wander through your story in your body. These are our dreams.
Since I no longer think
of reality
as reality,
what reason would I have
to think of dreams as dreams?
Saigyo (1118-1190)
Translated by Burton Watson
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