Eric says that after yesterday’s writing we should be a little more true to our predilection for dreaming and start to talk more of ephemera and the sort of things that differ from the day to day, well for most people. Just before I started writing I went outside to collect my thoughts out of the top left hand corner of my eye I saw a flash of cornflower blue and I allowed my eye to look up in the direction whence it came. My eyes followed the line up to the top of one of our yew trees as a large crow hopped onto the very crest of the tree. It waited there a while and then hopped back out of sight. Crows are couriers of power. This was a type of omen, because I was thinking about talking about dreaming and the silent acknowledgment of the crow agreed.
All today I have felt things jangling in a rather positive way in the web of life and my dreaming colour has come to me and into view a number of times, as it usually does when something relevant to me is going on. Tell this to someone in the church of reason and they may well reach for the diagnoses book. Such things though are a little beyond the scope of the normal human medical texts as yet.
The first time these types of phenomena begin to appear it can be both frightening and very easy to get obsessed by them. Now though I have had them for years and years; they no longer freak me out. The colour flashes are not physical plane colour flashes, in that if you were to take a picture with a conventional camera they would not be there. They appear in the perception as if you are seeing them with your eye; they are a flicker in the perceptual field that the brain recognises as seeing in the ocular sense. It clearly is not that though, it is something to do with the web of life, though, some form of oscillation. After monitoring this over a number of years I have found that the shade of colour often has information attached to it, some indication about what one should be doing.
Eric reminds me that we have as far as we can remember always had such things going on and that it was voices on the wind that we first really noticed. He is pretty sure that we have never ever spoken explicitly about this to anyone. These are perhaps the voices from Annwn, the other world of dreams, where everything is connected. They are of an ephemeral and floating kind, they hang haunting on the wind, just within and just beyond hearing. Like the colours one does not hear them with ears, one just hears them with consciousness. The power within registers the voices as a knowing the brain interprets as a hearing; different from insight, inner-sight and intuition, inner-tuition. The quality is very sound like in that it has tonal qualities and cadence, together with a sense of breathing to it. The feeling of breath is what brings the voices on to the wind and, in.
The world these days is a very noisy place and I don’t just mean all the mechanical noise that is around, the mobile phones and all that talking, talking, talking. Everywhere there appears to be a need for some background music sometimes tuned to Prozac station at the supermarket for all the desperate Stepford wives, other times to add some gaiety to the shop floor. That noise is in people’s heads. Go to any train station, fall silent and listen, listen to the incessant internal dialogue running round and around.
Eric says that one has to be quiet, very quiet to hear the voices in the wind and that it is very hard to do in the city. He reckons that if anyone really listens to the winds then they can turn off this internal dialogue and help learn how to listen with every fibre of being and this leads to a heightened state of awareness. Here, in that awareness, one can get a sense of the qualities and tones of the flow of the world, here then one can sense all the interconnectedness and that that tree and me are not that different. One can get a sense of the quantity of the universe and all its immensity, hear then one can get a sense of perspective. The silence beyond the clamour is where it is all at.
When I first heard those voices I thought they were nothing unusual, pretty ordinary and just took them as a day to day thing. Then I saw the film Betty Blue about a French woman who was a little crazy; “C’est seulement le vent, Betty”. After that I doubted whether it was such a good thing to hear these voices and tried to block them out. I found that singing helped a lot here. I lived in the city back then and it was on those late night walks back from the night bus stop when I used to hear them most. I used to get back from working in the club in the early hours of the morning. Even London is quiet then and the voices would come telling me about which plants were used for which ceremonies and that now that the hawthorn is blooming it is a good time for such and such. It was quite spooky, all alone, walking down those streets in North West London. After a while I relaxed about it, hadn’t one of my relatives been a gwrach? Perhaps then this was some lingering talent that I had inherited and I should not be afraid. Best not tell anybody though.
So the voices came and I listened to many, many winds; the soft gentle rustle as the yew trees play catch with the wind outside today, the haunting Aeolian scythe of wind in the telephone wires, the surf sparkled spray on an Atlantic day surging over the cliffs and the haunting melancholy of a late Spanish moor. The blotting paper wetness of mossy Welsh mist that creeps along a valley wearing a muffler and gloves and the timeless freezing fog of a Blumenthal forest, ancient and pregnant with snow.
Each wind has its own voice and mood. And those words they just kept coming, too. Sometimes it was a snippet of conversation from another land, or a pearl of wisdom. Sometimes it was a voice of trickery that scared me. I would catch a whiff of emotion too, borne on the wind, a tinge of fear here, a cloudburst or anger there. And my moods would match those of the wind, wild and windswept, stagnant and stifling. I learned to read the wind and its shift, both in me and not.
Eric says that the listening had paid dividends of a most peculiar nature. Now that I could listen people told me all sorts of things, things they never told anyone. He says that when people are truly deeply listened to it stirs something in them and acts like a magnet drawing out all those long held back words, it provides a wind to the sail of emotion and the timbre of their expression changes. Their stories come alive and vital. The silence acts as a void that draws and coaxes the first words out.
He reminds me how many times I have listened and for how long I have sat there and waited. He says that true listening is something that the world is bereft of these days. People do not take the time to make space and that what people are really afraid of is silence. He reckons a part of that is because it is for them the unknown and another part of it is that they know the seductiveness of silence and the power it has to make them lose their control. The precious doesn’t like this.
He says that listening can be very healing but reminds me that I have in the past carried that burden for many, many people and to my own detriment. He wonders if people remembered all the things they told me; they might be surprised at the level of disclosure. That is the good thing about introverts we joke; they keep it all in and safe. Yet it is all stored there.
So the voices and the colours are all phenomena experienced by the consciousness and are in some way related to things happening in the fabric of the web of life. The vis viva is animating it all and in heightened awareness the world we perceive can differ from the concrete day to day world which is shared as part of the common dream. These extra things are leaking through the concrete bastions the precious has set up and offer a hint at the other world journey. The other world is here too. It is not at another location, it is just that most of us don’t perceive it because the precious won’t let us.
The dream is fixed and until we wake up in the dream it is the only reality available to us. Yet that dream is Maya, it is Samsara and it is the folly of the precious that keeps it so.
When I stopped the world and saw that it was a dream, I knew I had begun to wake up to a separate reality that is every bit as real as the one that I thought I had been living in. To learn the ways of navigating this place pervaded by power is a work in progress, because that power is very, very real and it transcends the concrete reality of the world. It come before it and sets this dense physical plane in motion. It is the vis viva, that animates the power within and it is the power within that has chosen to experience the challenges of physical plane existence. After physical plane death the power within continues, it is no longer the power within per se; it has re-merged with the power without until such time as it has the next urge to incarnate.
The first step to waking up in the dream is to first of acknowledge that one possible hypothesis is that there is more to life than the “concrete” world, that perhaps that there are other realities and then to start building intent towards waking up in the dream. This is a neat trick because it placates the precious, miss-directs it, after all the precious is still in control because it is testing a hypothesis isn’t it?
What it doesn’t realise is that intent is way beyond the capacity of the precious to understand and because intent is related to true mind and not rationing rational mind; the precious likes the separative-ness of testing a hypothesis with perhaps a yes or no answer because there is an element of separating polarities at the level of true mind too and so it seems somehow familiar.
The next step is to build this intent by doing dreaming practice. Dreaming is best done, at least initially, in quiet with subdued lighting and no noise. The problem is that unless we have trained our bodies to relax properly and function well, the physical form is a source of noise. It doesn’t really matter how one gets one’s body under control, muscle relaxation techniques, martial arts and breathing all work. Then, the internal dialogue must be silenced. This can be done by focusing on a mantram, or visualising a yellow rose for example.
The noise of the precious needs stilled. The use of mantras has inherent in it a trap, the mantra becomes all. It is just a technique and nothing more than that. Working with the sound of Aum can help; it must not become all though, otherwise one cannot go further. When true calm comes the object of visualisation fades and then there is only blackness and silence. It is pretty hard to achieve and “noise” keeps breaking through. This is normal.
After some time practising; the darkness and quiet can be maintained for quite a while. Then one day specks of colour begin to pierce the darkness. Soon the “visual” field in inner space gets blotchy and expands into a rough edged ink blot; eventually the whole of the inner space can be filled with colour. This colour can and will change with time, it will settle down though. This then is how one gets into resonance with the power within and how one learns what part of the spectrum of the vis viva has incarnated. By staying in the colour things come, they are the guidance of your power within. You have learned to actively dream and sooner or later you will have the waking consciousness that the world of the precious is, but a dream. And that dream has inherent in it all the madness of human folly, the Maya and Samsara that cloaks the purpose of the power within and hence your true self. This is the initial act of waking up in the dream.
In parallel to active dreaming there is night time or passive dreaming. Everyone dreams and all one has to do is to remember the dream. This is a direct corollary for waking up in the dream, that is remembering the purpose of the power within and living true to the fate that one has set up for one self, in a sense manifesting the dream of the power within upon the physical plain. To do passive dreaming all one does is set one’s intent on remembering dreams. Sooner or later these can be remembered and written down; it is good to keep a notebook for these. These are the guidance of the power within that point at the next steps in unfolding fate. In time you will be fully conscious in the night time dreams, aware that you are dreaming.
As it is at night so it is in the day.
In time shifting into the dreaming colour can be done in the middle of Shinjuku station at rush hour. Eric says that it might be worth pointing out that when one is fully conscious whilst night dreaming, one can hear things going on in the physical world, be fully conscious of them and still be dreaming. He says that when fully operational in dreaming that consciousness can expand out over very large areas. He says that by listening to the wind and developing sensitivity to all sorts of things what in effect we are doing is training that sense of heightened awareness that the precious likes to keep quiet about. Deep down, you see, the precious knows that humans are capable of a lot more than they are ready to admit to and the precious is a jealous God, who needs constant worship.
The wind is calling now and whispering in my ear; time to finish for today and start again tomorrow.
Eric Rhosynglas
Traou an Dour 