Dreaming

"Dreaming is a route to power for a warrior."

Photo by Chip Marks

Dream now and dream constantly.  This is a matter of awareness in feeling, moving, seeing, hearing and relating."
                                                                                                    Arnold Mindell
~The Shaman's Body

We are always dreaming!  Like dreams that happen to us at night, synchronicities, fantasies and symptoms are daytime manifestations of the deeper dreaming reality we call the unconscious. Each of these experiences are dream doors; they take us out of our thinking mind to explore unknown aspects of our world, the unconscious wholeness that is "dreaming" into the realms of matter and psyche. Engaging our bodies through Sentient Awareness, we track this dreaming all day long, before these energies appear in our day and night dreams.

"Our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for specific purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it… Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector of all biological and psychic events.”
                                                                              Carl Jung ~Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

Sentience is a transpersonal awareness; it is our physical experience of undifferentiated consciousness, the unconscious, and connects with the underlying sentient reality from which our universe arises. When we engage Sentient Awareness to explore deep and subtle physical experiences and their relationship to this underlying reality, we enter a process don Juan and Arnold Mindell call “dreaming”.

When Sentient Awareness engages the Sentient Body, it accesses this process of "dreaming". Through subtle internal experiences, our bodies follow the personal and collective unconscious dreaming this world of matter and psyche into existence. Our Sentient Body is like a tracker in the wilderness. Following sensation, subtle cues and inner hunches, we explore the sentient underpinnings of reality before these energies enter our consensus reality world of parts and polarities.



“Dreaming” is similar to Jung's Active Imagination; our directed, controlling mind steps aside and the unconscious flows into awareness. Our conscious mind becomes a witness and participant rather than a prison guard to these altered states. Bringing awareness to unconscious processes, we unfold a creative dialogue of discovery as new and unexpected experiences emerge from the interaction of consciousness and the unconscious.

We catch experiences that "flicker" at the edge of awareness and focus on them. We look for subtle signals; energies that are the furthest from our ideas of ourselves, the most irrational and unlikely contain the greatest power to transform our worlds. We know that everything we experience is an aspect of ourselves, even the most difficult to comprehend or accept expands our definition of wholeness, for ourselves and the Earth. Through our bodies we join the Earth as participants on a global stage, we engage in Earth Dreaming.

“Learning to dream is not haphazard but active and deliberate. You consciously intervene with spontaneous experiences, combining altered states of consciousness with wakeful interventions and, above all, noticing which are primary and close to consciousness and which are secondary and far away. The warrior senses something unknown to her and consciously decides to use her second attention to explore it. She feels her way into processes, selecting events and experiences according to the energy in them. The events that are strangest and furthest from awareness, the most unearthly secondary processes, are the ones with the most power. “
                                                                                                 Arnold Mindell~ The Shaman’s Body


Artwork © 2008 Nöle Giulini  www.ngiulini.com
Artwork © 2008 Nöle Giulini  www.ngiulini.com

 

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner~1999

Share
Sentient Body © 2009