My search continues, although my journey started long before I found Denise Linn and Soul Coaching®. I have been searching, and I still search, for the One Great Dreamer. At first, in my fascination with dreams, I mistakenly thought that dreams were both the means and the end. I thought that if only I could understand the message of a dream, if I could crack the code, then I would know myself better and understand dreams and their messages. I scratched in the dirt like a dog following the scent of a buried treasure.
The Search For Treasure
My search continued and at first, the treasure was simply to understand dreams. I hoped that if I could learn to understand dreams I could understand myself. Plato would approve. For me, dreams were the technology for self-understanding. They still are, yet in that moment by the pool (see my last post), when I tried to visualize what all this would look like, I suddenly saw that self-understanding was but the outer ring in a series of concentric circles.
Picture This
At first I thought that dreams should be the core circle, and expanding outward from the dream, I would find dream-understanding, self-understanding and so on, in an outward, expanding movement. But when I started working with dreams, their movement drew me inward and the centre circle, the core of the matter, was God. My search moved far beyond the need to understand myself, taking me into a world that was not visible to the naked eye, and where dreams were the technology for understanding both Self and Spirit. It was what I was searching for all along. Dreams were the means, not the end.
Forgetting and Remembering
Dreamers often awake with a sense that they were dreaming without being able to remember the details of the dream; that there was something there, if only they could remember what that was. This is not a new phenomenon. In Plato’s Republic we learn of the Myth of Er. There, Socrates tells of a man called Er and of his journey into the next world after dying in battle. Er tells of the rewards, the punishments, the judgments that a soul encounters. But he tells of the choices a soul must make and finally, of the River Lethe as well. It is this River of Forgetfulness of which the souls are required to drink, causing each to forget everything they had experienced between death and rebirth.
More Forgetting
Judaism, too, tells of forgetting. In the Talmud it is told that before an infant is born the child learns the entire Torah in utero! But as the newborn is delivered, an angel taps the baby on it’s upper lip, causing it to forget (and thus explaining the indentation we all have under our nose, on our upper lip.) Throughout the ages, there was a sense of there being something that we once knew but have forgotten.
There’s a Word for That?
There is a word for it, anamnesis, which is a kind of remembrance, and means the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence. Although this is often a reference to Platonic thought—that learning is the remembrance of things forgotten but once known by a soul—this idea shows up with little variation in medicine, religion and psychology as something previous known that is recalled to memory. So we spend our lives searching for what we suspect we’ve forgotten and surely, we’ll know it when we find it, won’t we? Or will we have forgotten how to see as well?
Listening
A better question would be, “Have we forgotten how to listen”? I believe that we have. In my next post, I will tell you how I began to listen. (Hint: It began with my body!) But please don’t stress that I’m keeping you in suspense! I like to think that I’m asking you to develop your waiting and listening muscles. They are essential to the journey to connect with your soul. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it! Until next time….
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