Recently, I’ve been under the impression that I have been thinking a lot about dreaming.
It’s been a whole process. I started out looking for a way to feel better and less disintegrated about all the reading I do, and I believe I’ve found one. For one thing, I’ve really been letting my intuition guide my choice of books this month, and so far it’s been three books in a row about dreaming plus one about qabalah and one about tarot (both of which made it clear that I could think about those subjects in terms of dreaming, too).
Mystical Qabalah, by Dion Fortune, says:
“The symbol of the tree [pretty central to Kabbalah] is to the universal mind what the dream is to the individual ego. It is a glyph synthesized from subconsciousness to represent the hidden forces.”
This quote was a great find for me, because I also think a lot about the cultural and spiritual symbolism of trees, and this is one of the weird things about starting a newsletter while already in the process of living – I’d like to refer you to all the interesting thoughts I’ve already had about trees, but unfortunately you’ll have to take my word for it.
My current read is The Tarot, Magic, Alchemy, Hermeticism, & Neoplatonism, by Robert Place (who also illustrates beautiful tarot cards like the above), and it is now the number one tarot reference I would recommend. It has some interesting things to say about dreaming, and also about tree symbolism. For example, did you know that Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century Sufi-loving Franciscan who may have created the first visual model of The Tree of Knowledge as a map of the sciences, also popularized the symbolic visual depiction of some of the virtues that eventually ended up becoming tarot cards? In fact, they are actually shown here among the roots of this very tree, which somehow feels significant to me.
That’s an example of the kind of thing that has been keeping my conscious mind pretty busy recently – but the weird thing about the subconscious is that as often as you try to examine its contents, it just keeps sneakily making more.
Before I started all this dream work, the last big thing on my mind was self-discipline. I’ve always liked the idea of having a more active and regular spiritual practice, but unfortunately I’ve liked this idea for years and years without a ton of real-world change. At Halloween I decided to bring in some big guns with a ritual where I burned a bunch of personal demons – including Internet Addiction and Inertia – and asked for some serious spiritual help. I did start out with some pretty strong habits after that, getting quite a bit of practice done, but then of course life happened and I slowed down, stopped, and kind of gave up (which, I’m starting to realize, may sometimes be a surprisingly good sign).
When I started doing the Sufi group dream stuff, this idea of discipline, or at least serious practice, also started to pop back up occasionally. We were supposed to draw two oracle cards for advice, and I got “trusting” and “work.” When the mental thread I was following passed through Kabbalah territory, it passed perilously close to the archetypes of Mercy and Severity, AKA the big questions about effort and grace. Meanwhile, the books I was reading were easing me into a few daily practices – dream journaling, a tarot card of the day, and meditation on the breath – which I’ve been (finally, somewhat miraculously) completely regular about for the last couple of weeks.
The culmination of this group process is that we’re each supposed to create a personal ritual of commitment to whatever we want to grow with the imaginal seeds we’ve been planting. Maybe it’s because there has been a lot of Rumi going around in that group, but my mind went immediately to one of my all-time favorite images, from the poem The Sunrise Ruby:
In the early morning hour,
Just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
And take a drink of water.
She asks, “Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.”
He says, “There’s nothing left of me.
I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight.”
This is how Hallaj said, I am God,
and told the truth!
Since the first time I read this poem, I’ve wanted some kind of ruby-red glass thing to remind me of this soaring, transparent feeling, and maybe that was what was on my mind in terms of the way I’ve been feeling about dreams and the waking world. In any case, I finally ordered this little red crystal ball and thought I would figure out how to work it into my ritual.
I also figured I should go back and reread the actual poem, and was pretty amazed to discover there’s a whole second half that felt like a final enough word on the subject of personal effort for now:
The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Completely become hearing and ear,
and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.