DREAM: Three Asian persons wearing circle shaped hats were standing in a row dancing. It is not possible to tell if they are male or female. They seem to be introducing this 'water' dream about God and Humans.
The scene is a beautiful wooded creek. The water is clear and it is in a fully forested area. I am flying down the creek in the air just a few feet above it. I come to a place in the creek that has been turned into a safe swimming area. It appears that human technology has been used to pour concrete to make sides and a bottom for some distance in the creek.
Someone asks me 'who made this?' And I answer, " There is no simple answer to that question. It has been made by that which was not made."
I am now back on my feet in the creek enjoying the beauty and cleanliness of it with others. We are beginning to hike up the creek toward its source. I recall that Beverly and I had promised some friends we would rake their yard. There is now a sign in their yard saying that we had failed to do so. I felt badly and knew it had slipped my mind. I had forgotten to do it. But the time for that had passed and I knew they were very industrious and would find a way to get it done.
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| Creek In Cherokee North Carolina |
A young male child was telling his father that the Old Man of the stream, who lives at its source, has given him word he would inherit a spot on the stream. I felt the son should get the Old Man's signature to make it certain. But the father said he was sure the Old Man could be trusted.
REFLECTION: This struck me more at first as collective and archetypal than personal. But I think many of the images reflect my personal experience of the Sacred. I think the imagery here is very rich. It is personal in that it reminds me how I have been strongly attracted to and influenced by bodies of water during my life. I have lived by major natural water sources all my life. Shoals Creek in northwest AL where I spent much of my teen years on the water I have often said was 'my salvation'. The sight, beauty and pleasantness of the water kept me anchored to life in a positive way helping keep hidden, for many years, the threatening depression of my mother's, seemingly untimely, death.
I believe this dream is an image of the Sacred, of God. Jung stressed that water has always been an image of the unknown depths from which all that is has come. Humans are often pictured 'fishing' in waters hoping to bring some treasure or creature from its depths and sometimes they are not disappointed. We each are literaly born from our mother's water and live potentially to be 'born again.'
The greatest gifts that humans have given to their peers from religion, to science to literature have been through their being in touch with the 'depths', what we can now call the Collective Unconscious. This image of 'human and natural waters' is one of the human seeking to bring forth new life and advanced consciousness from the 'collective unconscious', the source from which all that is human has come.
The dream shows this water, this ultimate source, as now for me a place that is friendly and one offering up its beauty and pleasurable gifts to me and others. It assures there is a safe place where humans can now fully enjoy being immersed(baptized) in the water. It has been significantly humanized in the concrete pool. But this seeming 'human project' is not really the effort or plan of the human conscious mind. It cannot be easily answered as to who made this safe wonderful place. The answer is that it has been made by an ultimate Sacred, by 'that which has not been made.'
As frightening as the initial process of experiencing the Collective Unconscious, or of God, can be it is potentially a process where the raging, unbridled and wild aspects of God, of the whirling Godhead, of the Trinity( the three androgynous oriental figures); God of floods, insurrections, wars, vengence, death and deep-sea monsters is eventually tamed and becomes benevolent.
This would be an indication that the 'unconscious moral flaws and imperfection within the Godhead(Most Father-son relationships have eternally been complicated with strongly competing points of view.) have been in some significant sense healed and transcended by the mutual suffering that is always taking place with the Human and the Divine. The dream is suggesting that my experience of these things has moved, to some realizable extent, through such healing changes.
The three androgynous dancing Asians with circular hats(The circle is consistently a symbol of the Self or Divine in the discoveries of depth psychology.) are presented as introducing me to the Sacred. The Trinity symbolism is a very significant hard-won treasure which many believe to be the single greatest gift of Christianity to humanity. Hegel's widely influential philosophy in Western thought is often described as a trinitarian one involving the change process related to "thesis, antithesis and synthesis."
Yet, Jung offers serious evidence that the Christian Trinity is not anymore a sufficiently total or whole way of imaging God in our present chaotic times. But that a four-figure symbol or quarternity is now evolving of the Divine.
My dreamed 'oriental' ancient expression of the Trinity is quite personal for me for I think the ancient Chinese IChing book has been somewhat like an evolving trinity experience for me. The IChing is considered the oldest product of human writing in the world. Its name can be translated The Book Of Changes. It expresses what can be described as 'a wisdom for the moment' and direct knowledge(gnosis) which has been very much lost in Western cultures.
The best I can suggest is that when the IChing is approached sincerely and seeking such needed knowledge, it assists by touching on appropriate living archetypal themes of the Unconscious which apply to the specific human concern. I think it opens up the type of personification of wisdom described in the O.T. book of Proverbs, a wisdom that is best described by the feminine God-figure Sophia. It is not limited to cognitive head/intellectual knowledge but is a more whole reflecting/objective knowledge, sometimes sensed directly through bursts of content from the Collective Unconscious into the ego-consciousness of a person.
Such wisdom is capable of connecting one to the depths. It is a 'whole' knowing not just an intellectual one. It 'knows' through the senses and through the body. It is a Soul knowing. This kind of direct knowledge, I believe, is the original source of authentic religious experience and can be considered as a direct presentation from the Collective Unconscious, religiously described as a revelation of God.
There is much anecdote how this ancient IChing often seems to 'come' to a person who is in much need of its kind of assistance. That is how it came to me, practically falling into my lap from a high shelf in a musty Houston bookstore in 1985. Confucius is reported to have expressed regret near death that he did not give more attention to the IChing.
The IChing is numerically based on the number six which is the first multiple of three through which mythologically 'changes' come. This was more, beyond my previous acceptance of the reality of present day Holy Spirit activity from my Christian religious tradition, confirmation that the Sacred is fully present and active in the here and now of human life. It gave me the experience of God and Human being naturally connected and working in harmony with each other, each needing the other for mutual goals. The IChing, though so ancient, became a fresh vibrant introduction to the Sacred, even as the Bible with its word images of Jesus and the Spirit had been to me before.
The Trinity image in the dream is healthier than present orthodoxy offers for it is not so weighed to the masculine as the Christian Trinity. Neither sex is dominant in this image for the figures are androgynous. Present day Orthodoxy may not own it but the most traditional Western images of Jesus, the famous paintings and sculptures, are of a rather feminine Jesus. Jesus is pictured as very sweet, mild, tender and what to the Western mind is effeminate.
More recent images of a more masculine image of Jesus have been demanded by our masculine culture but these are very late arrivals. The long reigning more feminine Jesus comes closer to an androgynous Jesus that, in spite of the darker skinned robust modern pictures of Jesus, still also rightly lingers in many Western imaginations.
The image of the Human and the Sacred hiking, taking a journey, in the creek water also brings up a recognition of the imperfection of the human. I had forgotten to keep a promise. It was with good intentions but was an example of human weakness, forgetfulness. However such a mistake is self forgiven, confidence is not lost and no real harm is done to the relationship.
The last twist of the dream I think touches on the theme of 'afterlife' and of a kind of 'assurance' that a human can properly have. The source of the stream, the Old Man, which is perhaps one of the most common collective images of God in our culture, throughout other cultures and including Michelangelo's art, has given the child an assurance that he has an inheritance. A different reality to look forward to and it is described as a welcoming on the Sacred stream.
Then my ego thought in the dream is, 'you had better get that in writing to make it certain.' My reaction may reflect my uneasiness of claiming any certainty of a personally conscious afterlife. I simply see it as an unknown and likely to remain that way until we die and find out. Perhaps this dream suggests that I reconsider.
Then a friend of mine, the father of the child, has already refreshingly come to know that ultimately the Sacred voice can be trusted. Or as the Biblical theme stresses, God's covenant to the human will be kept.
The Sacred will not disappoint the simple trust of a child. The Sacred as a raging over-powering God(as frightenly emphasized in the book of Job) as arrogant, non-mutual and pictured making contradictory/confusing demands in Eden eventually becomes more balanced and we would say more humane. So the Sacred in the dream is able to offer up its more disciplined, tamed, caring and more morally clear self, which must be the reason the Sacred is motivated to keep becoming Human in the first place.
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