I believe all magic comes from (to use Martin Prechtel’s words) Grief, and Praise.

When I think about the wisdom of early civilizations, I tend to think of the lessons they held on to from their pre-civilized animist heritages.

The Eye of Horus above provides an example to me of wisdom. You can look for yourself into the mythology spun around this symbol, as I won’t go into it. Suffice to say this eye has special ‘luck’ and magic to it, because it replaced the plucked eye of someone who had many struggles after descending into the Underworld.

This, to me, represents the eye of someone who has successfully grieved. Grieving opens up the door for magic to happen. Miracles can happen when a tear sits on your cheek, as symbolized by the Eye above.

In much of the animist world, seekers ‘cry’ for visions, make themselves small and pitiable, so that the world of life will notice and take pity on them.

What a simple thing!

I remember one green and sunny Springtime, walking along the street in Khabarovsk, a city in the Russian Far East. There on the sidewalk I saw an injured puppy.

An injured puppy for god’s sake!

Watching him ignored by passers-by, I had to take him home to my tiny cramped room on the tenth floor of a high-rise slum.

I took pity on him. I’ve experienced the world do this all the time for me. Though the Laws of Life say one must kill to live, in the right situation, with enough sincerity, the world will take pity on one freely and openly grieving, as vulnerable as a mouse under the wide blue sky.

On the other side, we fulfill our role too when we have empathy for the world, and take pity on our other-than-human family hurting within it.

Both together make a cycle where needing to kill to eat, and inevitably dying so that others may live, becomes a beautiful dance rather than the cruel cycle of suffering and control all-to-familiar to civilized and domesticated peoples.

So miracles, magic and power in animism comes from the simplicity of real feelings.

Animist peoples see spirituality as simple as behaving in a sincere, human, and real way.

So to experience the magical reality of the animist world, you might start with learning how to cry again.

I’ve certainly had to.

I co-instruct SHIFT with my good friend and naturopath Dr. Michael Owen, hosted at the TrackersNW headquarters.

We’ve now expanded to two nights -

Mondays mostly courtesy of Dr. Mike, who has lived and breathed the world of martial-arts from the age of 6. He’ll focus mostly on western boxing, kickboxing,  and stick-fighting (via the filipino art of Kali/Eskrima).

Thursdays I instruct the feral movement side of things, including Standing/Zhan Zhuang, Animal movement, Stalking, and developing Center and grounding.

For details check out the SHIFT page here or the TrackersNW page linked above.

I don’t write that much on one of the most important things to me, the classic act of mythic cartography itself, of listening to and moving about the land and taking in the mythic-space it offers. Dreaming the dreams the Land itself dreams.

Until I do write something substantive on it, I’d like to share Yvonne Aburrow’s perspective on this activity. Check it out (the bit on walking the landscape sits towards the end…also, note that ‘wight’ means other-than-human person):

Attunement to the Landscape, by Yvonne Aburrow

Putting down roots

When you move to a new area, you feel uprooted. It takes a long time to put down roots and settle in the new place. That said, there are many magical techniques which can help you with this process…

What does ‘prehistory’ mean?

Though historians and scientists may use it in one context (before ‘recorded’ history, etc.), it stubbornly suggests quite a different one. In this sense, it means something quite animistic, something mythological. It wouldn’t surprise me if modern folks use it as a way to dismiss the ‘reality’ of three million years of rich human life, events, and interactions. Certainly our culture seems to equate ‘myth’ with ‘false’, with the need to ‘believe’ in it, because we certainly couldn’t ever prove it or experience it. If a mythic (not mythical!) event happened to you, why would you need to worry about whether or not you ‘believe in it’. You witnessed it. I suppose Christians would call this type of thing a miracle.

Anyway, I think I’ve gotten a little of track here. Back on subject:

Indigenous cultures often have three broad categories of stories, recognized as such. Stories of ‘when Animals and Humans still spoke the same language’, stories of the Ancestors of the people, and stories of the people themselves. Though these can overlap in purpose and category, they do tend to shake this way: myths, ancestral history, and the present era.

You’d think they proceed in a linear fashion, from creation stories (the beginning), to stories of historical ancestors (what came next), to the present era. And you’d have it pretty much the way most anthropologists understand it (and the way modern folks feel most comfortable with it). But you’d have it far differently from how animists see it.

The time called Dreamtime, Myth, and ‘the time when Animals and Humans still spoke the same language’ didn’t come first, it comes deepest. The time when they spoke together, you’ll notice happening right now, if you choose to go there. Right now.

As before, knowing your Dream-self never sleeps, the Dreamtime itself never went away. If it did, all life would end, because the Dreamtime occurs deepest and first in the creation of the present moment. The Waking-self happens on top of it, supported by it, as a ground on which to occur.

Modern humans prioritize Waking thought, intelligence, and logic as indicators of superiority, of primacy, without realizing them as flowers blossoming on an ancient tree of Dreaming. No tree, no flowers. No dream, no wake. The wood looks dead, the leaves and blossoms full of life. But don’t let appearances deceive you.

Animists can see the living nature of stones, wind, and stars, because they don’t only see Waking beings, but also the Dreaming beings that may or may not wake. What does it matter if they do or don’t? Without them, we certainly couldn’t.

This makes sense both in the most material sense, and in the most profound and spiritual sense.

At any moment, fully sober, you can choose to step into Mythspace, the Dreamtime, when Humans and Animals still spoke the same language. You simply change how you experience the moment. It doesn’t necessarily even take belief, although it may take at least ‘pretend’.
It should neither astonish nor impress anyone that children more easily access the Mythspace, the time of legend, for they play ‘pretend’ all the time. We don’t need Peter Pan to tell healthy children to believe in fairies. Adults however, and many children of cynical adults, do need him and messengers like him.

To geek out a little bit, I think Einstein first articulated the notion of space-time, an inseparable wholeness to an experience or event. I think that expresses the Dreamtime/Mythspace experience quite well.

In the past, Animists didn’t have clocks, but certainly experienced linear time as the Sun tracked across the sky. They also experienced rhythmic time, ecstatic time, and all kinds of time.

Our modern word for time means almost nothing useful. When animists describe time, they describe a whole different paradigm of experience. For me, Time best describes a way of experiencing, which I see people doing all the time.

The Time of waiting in line at the bank, differs substantially and experientially from the Time of an athlete in the zone, or a baby coming into the world of light and air. Both differ from the Time of Dream and Myth.

Too far down this path lies hallucenogenic self-indulgence and phantasmagoria. I’ve never valued that destination, because for me it ruins both the poetry of this, and the utility of it. Can I say these things without it degrading into total gibberish? I think it has helped me that I’ve never ingested any hallucinogen or entheogen, and so I’ve never relied on them for this experience. I don’t pass judgement on whether or not others use them, so don’t take it that way. I just want you to know the context in which I say all this. I first and foremost want to say something useful, rather than something entertaining, aesthetic, or impressive.

So if useful, how do you use it? I can only offer you as compass, that I mean every word quite explicitly, and I see all these ways of experiencing as quite testable and ‘falsifiable’ (in the scientific sense: you can test whether it models your experience well, or not). Try them out. Can you choose to enter a world full of living, dreaming, and waking other-than-human beings?

I bet you can.

I consider Gayle Delaney and Tom Brown, Jr. the best resources for unpacking our dreams, because both of them have the same fundamental message:

The final authority for the meaning of your dream symbols and metaphors comes from you. You own them. No one else can tell you what your dream means.

So we have stacks and stacks of ‘dream interpretation’ dictionaries and bibles, all happy to receive our power and authority to interpret the dreams that speak poetry in the language of our own unique hearts.

In a sense, as the title above suggests, to reject this looks like a kind of dream interpretation for anarchists.

Topple the dictators and tyrants of your dream life from their thrones, cast off the chains and manacles forged from the notion that you can learn about your dream through someone else’s opinion.

As I mentioned in the last post, this ends at the door of the tyrant of your own logical mind, who  ‘already knows what it means’.

So how do you reclaim your own dreaming authority? How do you pick up the responsibility for your own mythic life?

You ask yourself questions, or have a friend ask you questions. Step by step, you describe the elements in your dream.  As a questioner, you pretend you come from another world. You ask the dreamer to relate the whole dream, and then you go back to the beginning, and go through it piece by piece. You’ve never seen these elements before, you don’t recognize them, no matter how mundane. “I’ve never seen a dog. What do they do? Please describe them.” The dreamer, bit by bit, describes the elements. You’ll find one’s notions of ‘dog’ wildly varying from person to person, and herein you’ll discover your own native dream-tongue, the one that belongs to you and no-one else, the one you’ve carefully created your whole life, day by day.

Do myths and dreams, those messages laden with story and symbol that come to us out of the corner of our eyes, do they provide us with ‘the obvious answer’? The one we already know?

Or do they offer the difficult answer? The one we either can’t see, or don’t want to see?

I’ve recently stepped up my work with dreams, mainly with the support of my friend and mentor Linda Neale, using the dream interview model as innovated through Gayle Delaney’s work.

Some major realizations have broken through of late. In my history in working with my own, and others’ dreams, I’ve seen a  pattern of  an “I already think I know what it means” mindset.

The ‘aha!’s seem to come when we shatter those first impressions.

I think this stems from our need to conserve energy. Living beings love to conserve energy, by taking the easy route, and repeating the habitual act. Looking around at all the life, I know this must work to some extent, as a way of moving through the world.

And then you have dreams, myth, and heroes’ journeys.

They seem almost to wholly purpose themselves to break us out of habit and the ‘easy’ route, when needful.

So when I have a dream, and ‘I think I know what it means’, I purposely set that aside. More often than not, I shatter that first impression to pieces, with an ‘Aha!’ moment. I see an unlooked for angle, experience an unexpected insight.

So, whenever you dream and already you ‘think you know what it means’, consider setting that aside. For, why bother to dream if no insight awaits? Why do we need intuition if it only will say the easy-to-see thing?

Perhaps dreams naturally balance our habitual natures, through their chaos and color. Like the Hanged Man in a Tarot Deck, they dangle us upside-down for a moment, and if we fully let go, we can see around a corner, into hidden places, that our habitual minds walk busily past.

I see human beings as story animals. Birds make nests, beavers make dams, spiders weave webs, and humans make stories.

We can’t help it.

It probably started with tracking. Certainly, if story didn’t feed us, we wouldn’t tell them, or create them. And so tracking embodies our hunger for story. See the deer tracks. Follow the deer tracks. Harvest (or lose!) the deer.

Stories have a three-act structure, in this sense. Beginning, Middle, and End.

Lo and behold, wouldn’t you know, as story-making animals, our dreams often have three-act structures. We can’t help it.

The next time you have a vivid dream, lay it out. See if you can observe the three acts: Beginning, Middle, and End.

If you can, then ask yourself:

If the Beginning says, “When these events occur…”

And the Middle says, “And you then do (or did) this…”

The End then says, “It therefore has these results”

So, this could mean your dream has advice (‘doing this particular action will have these beneficial results’) or your dream may just want to alert you to something you haven’t noticed (‘doing this particular action always causes this other thing to occur, that you don’t see connecting’).

Dreams have a poetic and subtle structure, definitely. You can’t crack them open by chasing literal meanings. But seeing at least this dream story-structure will start you down the road to receiving real help from your dreams.

Resources:

Gayle Delaney’s All About Dreams

Tom Brown Jr.’s Awakening Spirits