Soul Haunting and The Dream!

Dreams, especially nightmares, can be loaded with haunting! Exactly...you did read the right words, just as I wrote them. Nightmares have lots and lots of juicy psychic stuff for insight, enlightenment, and soulful growth in the form of haunting. Thing is, we're so often afraid to listen to it, to the haunting. To listen to inner disturbance as it comes out in nightmares means facing the ghosts that always bear tidings of one sort or another.

Halloween and All Souls Day proclaim the existence of an unseen world. The veil between the world of waking and sleep, the realm of the deep unconscious mind, the spiritual world, thins. Spirits are real. People have reported dreams and waking visions of seeing spirits. I have a colleague, a psychotherapist, who is also a trained shaman. Unseen souls can inhabit homes, place, generate havoc! She's the one to call to exorcise the spirits so the home will sell. It's worked countless times for countless folks.

In the world of soul, the unseen world and the spirits that populate it bring messages into the world of consciousness. They haunt us till the message gets  through. They help us to grow, if we're willing. The spirit that appears by our bedside at night, the nightmares that haunt sleep, the dark events that come out of nowhere can shock us into consciousness...inspired change!

I had a rip-roaring nightmare last night of a literary demon. He was trying to force me into the mainstream literary establishment. I'd be abandoning my writing in dark fiction. It was frightening to say the least. A complete abandonment of self, of soul, was what the demon demanded. I awakened knowing that I had to remain true to my writing, true to myself.

Listening to the message of the nightmare, the spirits of the unseen world, means partaking of organic soul food and not Halloween trick-or-treat candy. Symbolically, candy can refer to a sweetening up of what's bad so that we don't taste it, feel it. Halloween tricks or treats...pass them up in favor of contemplating the haunting, the candle in the center of the carved out pumpkin head, its flickering, its eerie and unrelenting soul meaning.

Anxiety, Soul Sickness, and The Dream!

In this morning's newspaper I read an article about how anxiety increases perceived pain for those diagnosed with chronic pain conditions or those suffering from acute physical pain. In other words, the research stated that anxiety makes body pain worse. Anxiety also increases emotional and spiritual distress. When we're uptight everything goes out of whack. We're seeing through a magnifying lens of grotesque proportions. The soul has become sick.

"We all got a push for the crazies inside us," a very insightful person remarked. He went on to describe a dream in which he was splurging on ice cream. "As I ate, little tiny ants crawled up my arm."  The ants brought a terrible anxiety. Ants were messengers; raw angst crawling on him. "For me, bugs mean buggy. Sweets have  been an addiction. They're denial in my life. I'm in denial and I know it, can't run from it anymore. It's making my mind, body, and soul sick. It makes me anxious." Anxiety was a signal of denial at work, something needing to be faced and learned from.

Anxiety inflamed various physical disorders. He suffered from one aliment after another. His doctor told him that stress (anxiety) compromised his immune system. Running from what needed to be faced loaded him with anxiety. Ice cream in the dream signaled how he was wanting to sweeten things up.

The dream came, as dreams do, to enlighten. He was willing to see how he'd been "out of whack in my life." The crazies had bitten into him. Ants in the dream crawled over his skin, were in his mind, had infected soul. He'd become soul sick. The dream enlightened him about issues that needed to be faced, decisions that needed to be made. Anxiety was a symptom of soul sickness and the dream came as gift guiding the way to, what he described, as a "sense of getting it and getting myself whole again."

A New Spirituality!

I'm quoting from an email from Michael Eigen Ph.D., author of The Psychoanalytic Mystic. As I was having morning coffee and doing first of the day reading, it so struck me that I wanted to post it word for word. It's a source of inspiration from old masters in depth psychology and spirituality! 

This is the email:

Here is a quote from Emmanuel Levinas. Some of you might find it worthwhile.  I quote it in the chapter Guilt in Emotional Storm, which brings together work of Bion, Levinas and Wittgenstein.

It goes with passages of Bion on insoluble emotional problems. Perhaps akin to Buddha's attention to the problem of suffering. 

"...a new attitude…  the search for a proximity beyond the ideas exchanged, a 

proximity that lasts even after dialogue has become impossible. Beyond 

dialogue, a new maturity and earnestness, a new gravity and a new patience, and, if 

I may express it so, maturity and patience for insoluble problems...

    "Neither violence, nor guile, nor simple diplomacy, nor simple tact, nor 

pure tolerance, nor even simple sympathy, nor even simple friendship -  that 

attitude before insoluble problems, what can it be, and what can it contribute?

    "What can it be? The presence of persons before a problem. Attention and 

vigilance: not to sleep until the end of time, perhaps. The presence of 

persons who, for once, do not fade away into words, get lost in technical questions, 

freeze up into institutions or structures. The presence of persons in the 

full force of their irreplaceable identity, in the full force of their inevitable 

responsibility.  To recognize and name those insoluble substances and keep 

them from exploding in violence, guile, or politics, to keep watch where 

conflicts tend to break out, a new religiosity and solidarity – is loving one’s 

neighbor anything other than this? Not the facile, spontaneous elan,  but the 

difficult working on oneself: to go toward the Other where he is truly other, in 

the radical contradiction of their alterity, that place from which, for an 

insufficiently mature soul, hatred flows naturally or is deduced with infallible 

logic.  One must abstain from the convenience of ‘historical rights,’ ‘rights 

of enrootedness,’ ‘undeniable principles,’ and ‘the inalienable human 

condition.’ One must refuse to be caught up in the tangle of abstractions, whose 

principles are often evident, but whose dialectic, be it ever so rigorous, is 

murderous and criminal.  The presence of persons, proximity between persons: what 

will come of this new spirituality, that proximity without definite projects, 

that sort of vigilance without dialogue that, devoid of all definition, all 

thought, may resemble sleep?  To tell the truth, I don’t know. But before 

smiling at maturity for insoluble problems, a pathetic formula, actually, let us 

think, like one of my young students, of St. Exupery’s little prince, who asks 

the pilot stranded in the desert, who only knows how to draw a boa constricter 

digesting an elephant, to draw a sheep.  And I think what the little prince 

wants is that proverbial lamb who is as gentle as a lamb. But nothing could be 

more difficult. None of the sheep he draws pleases the little prince. They are 

either violent rams with big horns or too old. The little prince disdains the 

gentleness that only comes with extreme age.  So the pilot draws a 

parallelogram, the box in which the sheep is sleeping,  to the little prince’s great 

satisfaction.

"I do not know how to draw the solution to insoluble problems  It is still 

sleeping in the bottom of the box; but a box over which persons who have drawn 

close to each other keep watch. I have no idea other than the idea of the idea 

that one should have. The abstract drawing of the parallelogram – cradle of 

our hopes. I have the idea of a possibility in which the impossible may be 

sleeping."  

From Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence

Dreams, Gentle Whispers, and Peace of Mind!

It's one thing to talk about dreams, it's quite another to actually take them to heart and follow their inspiration. With a new book out, I've been listening to them; but, really taking them to heart has been a challenge. Outside voices from the book industry have said do this or do that. Dreams come and offer guidance in gentle whispers.

Gentle whispers from dreams mean that there is genuine inspiration coming our way. We don't have to have nightmares to get the message if we listen to the whispers. A couple of times I've gone back on what my dreams have whispered regarding my book. My soul has patiently waited as I then learned from what could have been avoided had I listened. It took energy from me to go through this, but I learned what I needed to learn. I also learned to listen and follow the gentle whispers of my dreams despite outward urging from others to do this or that, all contrary to the gentle whispers of dreams.

Peace of mind returns when we listen to the gentle whispers of dreams. We become realigned with Self. When the alignment with Self is interrupted then the mind is fractious, anxious. Alignment with Self, as happens when we listen to the gentle whispers of dreams, brings in peace of mind.

Well, I feel back on track with my writing and a new book making its way through the world. It's a good thing to move with and live with the peace of mind that comes from listening to the gentle whispers of dreams. Last night, as I dreamt, it was clear that innocence was being restored and my soul righted. Back on track, with a new and replenished sense of self making its way through the world, is a good thing and it comes with peace of mind.