A Seat at the Fox's Bar

 

I land at Washington's Dulles airport late, on a little prop plane that is not the one I was scheduled to take, after one of the bumpiest rides I have ever experienced outside a war zone. 
    I have time before my connecting flight to São Paulo, and I am starving. The only halfway decent place for a sit-down lunch on my concourse is a pub called The Fox and Firkin. It is jam-packed. But wait: a woman is getting up from the bar. A young man helps her to disentangle her luggage. I thank her for providing me with a seat at the right moment. "You'll enjoy this young man," she tells me.
    The young man at the bar is behaving oddly, hopping back and forth between the now vacant seat and the one he was sitting on. He finally decides I may have his previous seat. Clearly there is going to be some kind of engagement here. His baby-blue eyes float up out of a pale and desperate face. "I know you are an elder." 
    He asks me to guess his age. I do. Now he is almost beseeching. "What can you tell me about life?"
    "Never leave home without your sense of humor."
    "I know. But I get so intense, so aggressive. Like, if someone bumps the back of my seat -" he bumps the back of my seat to make his point ["-I want to get up and get in that guy's face."
     "I'll tell you something else I have learned about life," I remark after he hits the back of my seat a second time. "We always have the freedom to choose our attitude."
     He stops banging my seat. "Oh my God, you're right. It's amazing you just sit down next to me and say that."
     He pushes his face close to mine as if he needs to be petted. I am trying to think who he reminds me of. Got it. He resembles Smeagol, the Gollem in Lord of the Rings. The absence of hair on his head is the least notable point of resemblance.
     He wants something from me I can't yet fathom.
     But as he goes on talking, questioning, I begin to sense its shape. He talks about his military Virginia family, his estrangement from his dad. It is clear this has left a deep wound. My guess is that his father has not been able to accept that his son is gay.
     I tell him that, I too, come from a military family and that I was estranged from my father until three years before his death, when we became the best of friends. I tell the young man that if it were my life, I would make it my game to make all well with my dad while he is still in the world.
    "You're giving me goosebumps." He shows me. His whole arm is chicken skin.
    "Truth comes with goosebumps."   
    He is crying now. "You come into the bar, you take a seat, and you tell me the most important things I've ever been told."
     "Here's something else I've learned. The world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters. It's a kind of magic."
     "Is that what you are? A magician? You got me crying at the bar for chrissake."
    "Well that lady who gave me her seat did give you a good review."
    He wants to pay for my burger and beer. Of course I won't let him. He asks for a hug. I do give him that. 
    As usual, when plans get scrambled the Trickster comes into play. There is more than what we understand as chance going on in chance encounters. And sometimes they take place for the benefit of someone else.

Drawing by Robert Moss  

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity

Synchronicity: You Know It When You Feel It

 

You feel it in your fingers, in your toes and especially in your skin. It is, first and last, through our feelings that we know that coincidence is going on, and that it is meaningful. It can tickle, it can punch you in the gut. It can stop your breath or make you jump with delight. It can give you cold chills or warm shivers. It can feel like a pat on the shoulder, like a bisou on your cheek, like a jab in the small of your back.
     Feeling is your clue to meaning. I made an informal survey of 800 people who follow my work. I asked them the following question:

When you encounter significant coincidence (aka synchronicity) what do you feel and what do you say about it?

Here are some of the responses:

Usually I say, bring it on! I feel I am being shown I am on the right path.

I say thank you. I feel motivated to be alert and to be present.

 I shudder. I feel a tilt in the world. I say, "Hot damn!"

For a moment, the whole world stops and I am at one with the universe.

I always feel deeply grateful and special.

Often coincidences are very playful in my life. I smile or laugh, then look a little deeper. Is there something here I need to look at? Do I need to take action or just relax and enjoy the play?

Sometimes I giggle, sometimes I feel awe and oneness. The biggies I share with those who may appreciate or gain from it, and I try to note them all in my gratitude journal to keep 'em coming.

 It's like hearing the bell when the angel, Clarence, gets his wings in the movie ‘It's a Wonderful Life.’

 I feel very happy because I feel conscious and awake.

Chicken skin!

I feel lucky and supported and connected and I tell other people, to remind them of the story that we are collectively woven into

I just say, ‘Dang!’

I tell everybody about it, to remind them that life is magic.

I give thanks and gratitude for something far more sacred taking place than I had ever realized before .

Laughing and expectant, I say, Yes! and Thank you!

I feel it is my higher self and the universe conspiring to bring into my life all that is needed in just the right moment.

I feel things are working in the direction they should be.

I feel euphoric, giddy and scared. I know there’s magic afoot.

I get the warm fuzzy feeling like the universe is allowing me to see a few of the strings behind the special effects.

It’s like waking up suddenly.

I feel I’m on the right path, in touch, connected.

 I feel like I'm being nagged by something with a peculiar sense of humor. I generally chuckle and say, Alright then.

The message for me is, Pay attention

I say, Ah….someone is listening after all.

amused and supported 

I smile and enjoy the feeling of having my senses open. It's everywhere all the time and I just love it.

I say thank you to the universe and spirit, and then I always wonder what I might have been missing when I wasn't noticing a synchronicity around me.

I say, Gimme more please! Thank you! And what can I do with this? It makes me feel alive, enchanted and the world becomes sharper.

What is most striking in this informal survey is that no one who responded described the experience of synchronicity as scary. They find it thrilling and exciting. They did not speak of synchronicity as strange, either in the sense of being foreign to normal experience or in the sense of being a rare phenomenon in their lives. On the contrary, they spoke again and again of how the experience makes them feel at home in a conscious, benign universe where they are recognized and supported. Some talked of receiving “divine winks” or “secret handshakes”.   Nobody described the experience of synchronicity as “weird” until I introduced focused discussion of that word later on. Again and again, we heard responders saying, Gimme more please, Bring it on! What was “weird” to them was not the phenomenon of synchronicity, but missing out on it.

I see I must add the wisdom of Laotzi, in the Tao Te Ching, to the counsel on navigating  by synchronicity I presented in my book Sidewalk Oracles: "The sage is guided by what he feels". 

 

Photo by RM from Sibiu, Romania

Speaking Land

 

The easiest way to understand synchronicity is the oldest. We live in a conscious universe, where everything is alive, everything is connected, everything has spirit. Early peoples say that humans are the animals that tell stories about all the others, but this does not mean that humans are the only ones talking. Birds speak in complex languages, bees are great communicators and their drone or hum is the sound that humans often hear when their inner senses are opening. A stone can speak, though it may lie dormant and silent until approached in the right way. A river or a mountain can speak. Thunder is louder than any human could speak until people started making things that can blow up cities.
     The Aborigines of my native Australia say that we live in a Speaking Land where everything is speaking. How much we can hear depends on how we use our senses, both inner and outer. How much we can use and understand depends on selection, on grasping what matters.
      While the world around us is alive and spirited, it is also the playground or boxing ring for spirits whose home is in other realities. Some have been worshipped as gods, invoked as angels or feared as demons, and still are by many. A passage in the Puranas informs us that there are forty thousand orders of beings, humanoid to human perception, that are within contact range of humans. They may be friendly, hostile or inimical to humans and human agendas.
      The air is thickly settled, as they say on New England road signs, with spirits of the dead. Some are bound to certain places. Some are hitchhikers, getting around by riding the living. Some are visitors dropping in for the night. Some are commuters from the astral realm of the Moon. They may have been promoted to the rank of daimon and given responsibility, under the supervision of higher intelligences, for watching, counseling, or intervening in the lives of people on Earth.
      From this very ancient and primal perspective, it’s all personal. 


Photo by RM

The Dream Recorder and the Perilous Bridge

Rock Bridge at T'ien-t'ai Mountain

The Rock Bridge of T'en t'ai (Tiantai) Mountain in eastern China is a famously wild and dangerous crossing regarded as a Bridge of Heaven to a land of luohans, heavenly beings depicted as Buddhist monks. The bridge narrows to a few inches, high above a rift valley with a great waterfall, and presents the traveler with a seemingly unscalable hump of rock. In a 12th century painting by Zhou Jichang, a fearful monk is shown approaching this obstacle, observed by luohans floating on clouds. [1]

The physical journey to the rock bridge was made around 1071 by a Japanese Tendai monk named Jōjin. Keeping a dream journal was part of his daily spiritual practice. When he made his journey to China, he not only wrote down his dreams as soon as he woke but carried his "Dream Record" for the past years with him, and noted how it gave him roadside assistance. When he neared the rock bridge, he recognized, in every detail, the bridge he had seen in a dream he recorded a decade earlier, in 1061. The bridge broke in his dream, but a dream character helped him across. He read his old report and wrote on a fresh page:

“Looking through my Dream Record. I see that on the 30th of the 7th month in the fourth year of Kohyo (1061) I dreamed I was crossing over a great river by a stone bridge. Before I was across the bridge broke, but someone else got across by stepping along my bed and eventually got me across in the same way. Even in my dream. I felt sure that the bridge was the stone bridge at T’ien-t’ai in China about which it is said that only one who has attained to the Highest Enlightenment get safely across.

“Now, long afterwards, I was delighted that my dream had come true and that I had succeeded in crossing the bridge. I examined its construction carefully and it corresponded in every way to the bridge in my dream.” [2]

From the profusion of dreams in Buddhist and Daoist literature from this era we can be sure that Jōjin was not alone in keeping a Dream Record, and in paying attention to how dreams foreshadow future events. While some Buddhist rhetoric (for example, the Diamond Sutra) is famoulsy dismissive of dreams as the model of illusion, in practice dreaming and dreamwork have been at the heart of Buddhism since Gautama's mother dreamed of his coming and his wife dreamed of him leaving home. [3]

References

1. Wen Fong, The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven (Washington D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, 1958) 9-17

2. Arthur Waley,“Some Far-Eastern Dreams” in The Secret History of the Mongols & Other Works (Looe, Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2008) 67

3. Serinity Young, Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999)

Art: "Rock Bridge at T'ien-t'ai Mountain" by Zhou Jichang. Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

The Empress and her red-hot lover, Jesus

Empress Zoe does not appear to mind that the emperor has installed his official mistress in the Grand Palace, right opposite her own apartments. She has her own red-hot lover, Jesus.
    The rapture she shares with him is not a disembodied transport of the spirit. She has helped to create a physical body in which she may commune with Jesus in her private chamber. This is a full-size statue, anatomically complete, that has many properties that seem bizarre but were not unknown to crafters of "breathing images" in many cultures, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the crumbling Byzantine empire to Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist temples today. A modern sex shop could no doubt produce a superior technical version, but you would have to shop elsewhere for the psychospiritual battery.
     The empress believes her statue to be fully aliveand ensouled. She kisses and caresses it. In moments of distress, she alternately clasps the icon, speaks to it as to a living person, addresses it as her lover, or flings herself to the ground, wailing and beating her breast.
     Beyond this, the complexion of her savior of the bedchamber is quite changeable. She uses the changes in color as a mode of divination. When Jesus turns pallid, she is stricken with fear than an evil event will take place, to the point where she may throw herself to the floor and beat her breast and rend her clothes. When Jesus turns ruddy, however, she is assured that her affairs - and those of the empire - will go well. She gives advice to her husband, the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, based on the skin tone of her holy statue.
    She feeds the spirit in the statue with perfumes and incense, in immense quantities. Any necromancer knows that spirits don't feed on gross food and drink, but on the essence or vapor of things; they are sniffers rather than swallowers. Fires burn in braziers day and night in the empress' chambers, even in the full heat of summer, as she keeps her retainers working to produce new aromas to please and feed her spirit lover and keep him lively in the body she has crafted for him. Aromatic substances are placed inside the effigy, to fuel and recharge its spirit.
     A fantasy story? No more than other episodes of Byzantine history, carefully recorded in the 11th-century Chronographia of Michael Psellus and available in a Penguin translation retitled Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. Psellus [1]was no minor clerk who gathered gossip; he was the foremost philosopher and orator of his day and an imperial counselor who rose as high as prime minister. He became a monk but loved the Neoplatonists more than the scriptures, on the evidence of his books, and did more than anyone in his age to rescue their w0rks from obscurity. Byzantine scholar John Duffy says of Psellus: "Singlehandedly, he was responsible for bringing back, almost from the dead, an entire group of occult authors and books whose existence had long been as good as forgotten." [2]
    His understanding of what was going on between Zoe and her Jesus statue was informed by first-hand observation, and also by the study of works on theurgy: a lost commentary by Proclus and the Chaldaean Oracles, an essential text for practitioners of high magic in late antiquity. Psellus was not only a learned man; he sought "a wisdom which is beyond all demonstration, apprehensible only by the intellect of a wise man, in moments of inspiration." [3]


Graphic: mosaic of  Empress Zoe with Jesus and her third husband, the emperor Constantine IX. Her face was repainted at least twice. Here she is at least 70 but made to look much younger. 

Notes
1. Psellos, in Greek, means "Stammerer". Maybe Michael Psellos (like Demosthenes) had to overcome an early speech defect; he was certainly no stammerer when it came to winning the ear of emperors. His surname is widely latinized as Psellus.
2. John Duffy, "Reactions of Two Byzantine Intellectuals to the Theory and Practice of Magic: Michael Psellos and Michael Italikos" in Henry Maguire (ed) Byzantine Magic (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995) p. 83.
3. E.R.A. Sewter (trans) Fourteen Byzantine Rules: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) p.175

Everyday Dream Archaeology: Imhotep and the Bears

 

Dreams can introduce us to cultures and spiritual connections we might not otherwise know about. A woman in one of my courses received the name Imhotep in a dream. She knew it was Egyptian but knew nothing about Imhotep himself. She accepted the research assignment and discovered that in ancient Egypt, Imhotep, whose name means "comes in peace,” became associated with medicine and healing. In the late period, Cleopatra's time, the shrines of Imhotep were sites of dream incubation for healing in the style of the Asklepian temples of the Greco-Roman world. The dreamer’s curiosity deepened. Why was she dreaming of Imhotep? And what did an Egyptian god have to do with the other characters in her dream, in which she found herself in a happy family of black bears, gamboling with them and perfectly at home?

Historically, Imhotep was famous as an architect before he became a god. He is said to have designed the step pyramid of Djoser in the 27th century bce. It was only 2,200 years later that he started to be recognized as a physician. That probably came in because of people's dreams. Maybe they dreamed of a physician by that name. Imhotep was celebrated in Cleopatra's time as a physician whose sanctuaries were places where dreams healed. At Saqqara, on the west side of the Nile from the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, there was a temple of Imhotep where people went to dream or have their dreams interpreted by professionals. In Karnak, in a vanished temple of Imhotep, at one time there were no fewer than fifty priests responsible for dream rituals and interpretation. There are records of a very knowledgeable dreamer whose name was Hor. He was actually a priest of Thoth and used to dream amongst the mummified ibis birds in the temple of Thoth. But when it came to reading an important but confusing dream, the priest of Thoth went to "a magician of Imhotep” to get a definitive reading. [1]

So a modern American woman dreams of an Egyptian deity and a family of black bears. She learns that Imhotep was at the center of a cult of dream healing at a time when ordinary people are gaining access to sites and practices once reserved for royalty and closed priesthoods. What’s with the bears? Their appearance in a dream of an ancient god was both thrilling and strangely familiar for me. 

In the first years when I was leading public workshops in Active Dreaming, I often placed a statue of Asclepius on the altar at the center of the circle. These gatherings usually started with the group singing a song to call the Bear as healer and protector. During one of these workshops, as I circled the room, beating my drum to power a journey to a place of healing, I asked about the possible connection between the Bear – the great medicine animal of North America – and an Old World deity of dream healing. Suddenly I saw the energy form of the bear joining what had become the living statue of the god. The two fused and came together. In my vision I saw that in the New World, the Medicine Bear is a counterpart for what Asklepios and maybe Imhotep meant in the ancient world of the Greeks and the Egyptians. I think this perception would have delighted the ancient mind because the ancient mind was forever shuffling things together, making hybrid deities, melding different traditions, borrowing power and “breathing images” from many cultures.

“You are a natural at this,” I told the woman who dreamed the name of an Egyptian god while dancing with bears. She said that when she needed help in healing, she now knew just who to call. 

1. One one ostrakon, Hor, a native Egyptian, left this invocation: I call upon thee  in heaven, in earth, Imhotep…come for a dream, come forth." O.Hor 18, verso, 1–3, 18 trans. J.D. Ray inThe Archive of Hor: Excavations at North Saqqara (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1976), 2 vols.

 

 

Life on the Moon

Who lives on Luna? 

Permanent residents in my realm are few, though some of us live here for millennia by human counting.

We receive dreamers and soul travelers in vast numbers.

We are a transit lounge for spirits on their way to incarnation on Earth, and for ex-physicals who come up from the sublunar planes. Some of those admitted to this realm after death on Earth  find solace for ages in our pleasure palaces and studios, before they are ready for another death and another birth. Some pursue their studies in our schools, where many things are created and discovered before they manifest on Earth. Some become interpreters and teachers for physicals.

I have heard that spirits transit this realm on the way to physical birth. Are there conditions for taking on a human body? Is a contract made before a soul goes down? 

You don’t get born into a human body without formalities. Everyone who is born on Earth has entered into a contract. A typical contract specifies the allotment of time-energy available to you in the life form you are entering. Time-energy is a package, not two different things. In the Assyrian language, we have a precise term, shimtu. The exact length of the life you are given may vary according to how carefully, or recklessly, you expend this time-energy. Living in balance, averaging a gentle cruising speed, you may manage a hundred years; treat your body like a hot rod and you can go to the junkyard early.

The life contract does not give ironclad protection again the events insurance companies call “acts of God”, or against criminal interference.

You may end your life prematurely. This is a serious contractual violation that has unhappy consequences, though not the eternal damnation invented by some churchmen. Suicide is never part of a life contract. However, facing conditions that may tempt you to destroy yourself is quite often an important clause.

The allotment of time-energy is one of the two key elements in the contract. The other is the definition of the life assignment you have agreed to undertake.

Contrary to appearances, everyone born into a human body has agreed to their situation, though not everyone has the same degree of choice and the choices that are made are often ill-considered.

One of the greatest acts of memory is to recall the terms of your life contract and who you were and where you were when you entered into it.

How long do spirits remain in the realm of Luna after physical death? 

Let’s be clear that this is a gated community. You don’t get in without paying your dues. There are many who are rejected at the gate, and some we have to throw out. They fall back into the astral slums below us that the Greeks called Hades.

Some discarnates spend the equivalent of many, many lifetimes here. They enjoy the social environment, they study and teach in our schools, they practice reality creation. Some become mentors and oracles for people on Earth. Some serve as messengers, zephyrs who carry dreams to sleepers.

If you earn the right to go higher, and choose to do that, you are given a new outfit and you are required to leave your current vehicle behind.  When you take off your astral body, you don’t want to leave it lying around for anyone else to pick up. Depending on the quality, that could be like leaving a fur coat in the street. Someone is going to pick it up. Even if your threads are worn, they might be attractive to a passing spirit that wants to put on a new guise, or impersonate you, as a prank or for deliberate deception.    

We have locker rooms where you can check your astral body as you would check your street clothes on the way to the gym.

Few of the graduates who leave astral bodies in these lockers will wish to retrieve them. Now equipped with celestial bodies – which don’t fit over or under an astral suit – they know the joy of liberation from lesser forms and the appetites and cravings that go with them.

However, there are other uses for left-behind astral bodies. In the Messenger Service, some couriers are licensed to use these outfits in their encounters with people down below. So the deceased lover or father who visits a survivor could be that person, dropping by in the astral body – or an actor who has dressed up in that guise.

The actors or guisers should not be confused with the deceivers and thieves who hijack astral bodies for malign purposes. Their operations have sown much confusion and darkness.

Drawing of a Daimon of Luna by Robert Moss

- Excerpt from "Conversation with a Daimon of Luna" in Mysterious Realities by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.