EYE OF DREAMS
Tony Crisp
Introduction
The Journey And The Discovery
Throughout more than four decades I have been involved in a personal search for the secrets of mind and spirit. In those years I have also been involved in teaching thousands of people techniques of deep relaxation, meditation, and methods of self exploration. Wanting to dig deep I explored the use of dreams and taught individuals and groups how to use these visions of the night to explore the deepest issues in themselves, and to touch the high ground of their spiritual awareness. I worked for twenty years as a psychotherapist using several approaches, one of which was a way of honouring the body as a doorway to the mind and emotions.
During the forty years of seeking the wild wondrous beasts of the soul and spirit, I dared my own inner adventure. But I also travelled with other people, sharing their experience of fear and wonder as they unveiled and set loose their fountain of perception. I have trod countless dream pathways, traversed the timeless with those using drugs, and wrestled with the vitality of the body as it mimed and shouted its deepest intuitions through movement, dance and voice.
The journeys, alone or with others, led into a realm of experience that comparatively few people know exists. It is a realm in which the world, our life and preoccupations are seen from completely new perspectives. As such it is a realm of experience that is incredibly creative, containing treasures equally as fascinating as any tomb of Tutankhamun. Having access to this realm enormously enlarges our experience of life and the understanding we bring to work and relationships. It is also a great transformer, in that the common cultural views of who we are, and what our life and death is, are torn down to be replaced by more inclusive views.
The realm referred to has often been called ‘the unconscious’ by explorers such as Freud or Jung. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the unconscious as ‘that part of the mind which is inaccessible to the conscious mind but which affects behaviour, emotions, etc.’ The suggestion is that the unconscious is not often accessible, but if one does gain access to it, it is a purely mental thing.
More recent investigators have shown quite different approaches to understanding the phenomena of meeting the fuller contents of our being. These include information showing how much the body is involved in storing or ‘remembering’ experience. Work on defining the action of the left and right brain lobes also suggest that what was thought at one time to be facets of the ‘unconscious’ might better be thought of as subordinate brain processes. They remain unconscious simply because the dominant process drowns them out, not because they are hidden or of no account, or the discarded or repressed areas of desire or memory.
This can be thought of as akin to a person playing a melodic tune on a flute, but they are drowned out by a brass band playing a march. If the brass band is quietened, we can then hear the tune of the flute. In fact most of the techniques that introduce us to the realm of the ‘unconscious’ are ones which quieten the noise of the dominant brain processes or sensory preoccupations. When this succeeds, suddenly a new experience of oneself is revealed, just as real, just as persuasive as our usual experience of ourselves, but offering rich alternatives and enlargements.
Therefore, if the definition of unconscious is ‘the extended faculties and perceptions of the senses, mind and emotions that are usually obscured by the dominant processes’, then my explorations have been of the landscapes and treasures of the unconscious.
I am certain that what I have gathered from looking at the world through the eyes of dreams, of people’s usually unconscious inner life, is as wondrous a vision as that of astronauts who for the first time achieved a new view of the world, and saw the splendour and fragility of it. But rather than looking from the port of a space capsule, this view is through the incredibly dynamic processes of mind which integrate experience and creatively presents it. It is certainly as rich in the realisation of our past as the great archaeological digs in Troy or the Rift valley. It is as challenging of our future endeavour as a planned colony on the Moon.
Just as the view the astronauts presented to us through cameras and their own personal feelings, was the same wonderful world we all know seen from a different place, so the world of inner vision is not new. Thousand of men and women have moved through the lands and skies of their inner life throughout history. But they viewed and described their findings from the platform and perspective of their own times and perhaps their own religious beliefs. Because our own culture has access to so many beliefs, so many cultural viewpoints, and yet is not held in thrall by any of them, I believe there is a new form of information arising from what I call vision, gained by accessing experience of the unconscious. The information is no longer couched in symbols, in religious dogmas or scientific certainties. It partakes of all aspects of human knowledge and clarifies much of what humans developed in the past, and influences them so much today.
So I am writing here about dreams, about daring visions, about the power of growth and creativity within a person that attempts to burst through the restrictions and fears hemming in ones transformative power. They break through because the person dares to allow their habitual response to the world to be silenced for a while, so other voices, other views can be known. I write about this voice and vision that arises out of the silence for the person who willingly faces the ferment of discovering what their life means, and what understanding they can gather from the world around them. It is for those who do not mind the discomfort of doubt and of conjecture, because they are alive in spirit and forever taking in the new and restructuring their perception of life.
Very often we treat our own native genius, our own thrusting, living and magnificent perceptions like dangerous beasts to be held at bay lest they tear apart our attempts at building a safe concept of the world. But there is a natural bond linking us with these untamed forces in us that arises from the process of our life itself. The bond is that the forces active in the unconscious constantly strive for survival, and part of that striving is in the area of feeling, of knowing, of understanding. The struggle we see in our cells to maintain their equilibrium and identity exists also in our soul and mind. In finding an alliance instead of a state of war or suppression with this process within us, our life is enhanced, perhaps transformed.
At a completely practical level I believe that what is being learned by people today who dare to look within enables those who use it to achieve a more satisfying and balanced life. They are enabled to achieve more than they could without the skills presented through the vision and voice of the silence. From the apparent silence and darkness emerge the skills to navigate the shifting experience of the outside world, of ones own fears and weaknesses, potentials and opportunities, with the balance of a surf-rider. One can literally ride the lightning of life’s ever shifting action.
The New Wine
I wish to make as clear as I can what this ‘vision’ or ‘new wine’ is. The term is evocative because it is an image, but it describes nothing unless it is defined, and the clearest definition is to say it concerns information gathered by looking at human life and nature in a different way.
We all know that a very rational person would look at an event quite differently to someone who is very emotional. Also an engineer would see or have a personal response to a structure quite differently to an artist or a child. Although it would be ridiculous to say one of these views was right and the other wrong, as a culture and as individuals we nevertheless often fall into the trap of building our personal and social life from limited viewpoints. Some of the most prevalent are the rational, the economic and the egocentric viewpoints. Whatever happens to be our prevalent viewpoint tends to be taken as ‘the truth’. So for a person with a religious temperament, the ‘truth’ is that God exists. For a person with a rational scientific temperament, the ‘truth’ might be that God does not exist or is not capable of experimental evaluation.
The variety of the positions people can look at the world, and arrive at a ‘truth’ is endless. In this regard it is an interesting exercise to realise that if our physical size were radically different our view of the world would be completely changed. To be the size of a molecule, or a planet or even an ant would shift our values, and therefore our assessment of things. And it is worth reiterating that none of the viewpoints by themselves totally hold all truth, and none totally without any truth. This is the very first level of freedom and creativity offered by the new wine - release from rigid viewpoints and old dogmas.
The information I wish to present is from a more inclusive viewpoint than any of the above taken separately. I believe it is taken from a level of human consciousness which synthesises personal and cultural experience. How this happens, what the view of life is when it happens, and how it relates to everyday life, will be the theme of this book. The aim is also to make the information presented transformative in the very reading, a work book without enormous labour.
Nevertheless the views presented are still only a view of life, as any ideas are, and they are largely personal in that I am the one who has explored and formulated what is presented. So there is no need to argue their truth or infallibility. I offer what is said only as my best, gathered from years of search in a strange country, the motherland of the human personality.
Much of the following material is put together from many people’s description of their inner, perhaps very subjective, experience. The material has been gathered over thirty years. Much of it has come from people’s dreams and their investigation of their dreams via an entry into the emotions and themes the dreams portrayed. I am not talking here about interpreting their dreams, although with some of the material this has been done. The investigation I mean is where the dreamer is willing to allow and explore powerful and unexpected emotional response to the symbols of the dream. When this feeling response is well under way, exceptional insights or experiences often arise in which the person arrives at new perceptions of themselves, their behaviour, or the world around them and within them.
I also include in this synthesis of human experience, the descriptions of people who have used drugs to enlarge their perception of themselves, or those who have used special approaches to the unconscious such as meditation. In fact over twenty five years of my experience was gathered from personal use, and through teaching, a technique described in my books Mind And Movement and Liberating The Body ((1)), in which one can explore the unconscious while awake and without drugs, by allowing spontaneous movement and feeling expression, much as Carl Jung describes in his commentary in the book Secret of the Golden Flower. I observed hundreds of people using this approach from 1972 onwards, and it greatly enriched my experience of the unconscious activities and usually untapped perceptions I believe we all have. ((2))
Through these years of observations, I believe each of us have a way of organising information and experience that is extraordinarily different to what we usually describe as ‘normal’ perceptions. In fact ‘normal’ perception, in which our attention is focused on a narrow range of ideas and memories, what one might call a narrow beam view of life, is the polar opposite of a wide or global beam view active unconsciously in all of us. The research into right brain and left brain perceptions has given us clearer ways of thinking about this, and made it possible for people to believe there is an aspect of their own mental functioning that is non-dominant and pushed into the background of their awareness. If this can be accepted, the ideas and viewpoints within this can be understood.
Lastly, I believe this polar opposite of mental activity, this non-dominant function of perception is like an extraordinary aid to our gathering of information. Just as a telescope or microscope extend the ability of our normal senses and perceptions, but do not replace the normal sensory and mental action, so this global view acts as an amazing synthesiser of experience, and throws into relief aspects of what we have learnt from our gathered experience, that we usually totally miss in our normal mode.
Because of this, I see the ideas and views presented here as having an effect on our personality and mind, helping us to balance the one-sided action of our rational mind, and make us whole.
Eye of Dreams Part One - Eye of Dreams Part Two - Eye of Dreams Part Three - Eye of Dreams Part Four - Eye of Dreams Part Five - Eye of Dreams Part Six -
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