Important Dreams: River of Stars

From 1998

A lot of my energy and focus in the past fifteen years or so has been to come to terms with and try to heal or at least integrate life here on this planet, bearing in mind what I wrote above about life arising on planets and my feelings about life here. In the past few years I’ve been doing a huge amount of “house cleaning” and sorting—much of what I said in the 1995 letters about sexuality, male/female polarities, the spiritual marriage, and so on, have to do with that. When I first started doing the house cleaning I realized that it was entirely voluntary, and I really didn’t have too much sense about where it would take me. In hind site it has been a huge ordeal, a major gut wrenching undertaking, and I seriously doubt I would have been able to do it if I hadn’t first been able to follow myself back at least to the level of the universal body simply for some relief.

I want to write about that next.

A dream: I’m looking at an ocean of stars and I can see the ocean narrow down and turn into a river, and I follow the river until it comes to a place where it’s narrow and congested and most of the river of stars doesn’t get through, only a trickle. I follow the trickle down until I come to a town. The main street of the town has all kinds of buildings and stores with their names on the fronts, but any building or store I go into only seems to be a barbershop and all the barbers are women. They all want to give me a haircut, but I say no thanks.

For the longest time I thought this dream was about life on this planet in a planetary sense, and in that context I could make sense of the river of stars turning into a trickle, but the barbershops, women barbers, and haircuts didn’t really fit in. What I immediately associated with the haircuts was the story of Samson and Delilah, but I couldn’t integrate that into a planetary scenario. Later on, after I had gone through the whole process of the “spiritual marriage”, of reclaiming my left side, and so on (you’ll have to re-read parts of the 1995 letters for this), I came to realize that the dream was personal rather than planetary although in most instances it applies to most people on this planet.

This how I understand the dream now: the ocean of stars is my universal body, as I wrote about above. The ocean turning into a river is the interface, if you will, between my universal body and my individual existence. The river should have been flowing freely all the way into the town, but it had been congested at a certain point and reduced to a trickle. It had been reduced to a trickle because of my relationship with women, because I saw women as other than me, because I gave myself away to women because I wanted to be loved. I wrote this to my brother:

“Remember we once talked about giving away your left side to someone and then having your life revolve around them? Or WANTING to give away your left side and not finding anyone, and not feeling complete until you’ve given away your left side? After you’ve been in a relationship for awhile, especially a long while, you forget what it feels like to own all of yourself —the very first relationship, the very first time you give away your left side, is to your mother. Most men try to recreate that, continue that, or fix that relationship in the women they meet and have relationships with.

The pain of the emptiness of an empty left side is all the stuff you’ve been feeling, and all the stuff anyone feels after a broken relationship. In the end, everyone wants to find a relationship that will be permanent, eternal, and that will forever end that emptiness. You can only do that by reclaiming your left side and your own other half (feminine in this case). No mother and no other woman can do that for you, but they can all be vehicles on the way since they’ll contain and mirror your projections of your relationship with your (supposedly) missing side. Note “supposedly”. That entire process of reclamation is the “spiritual marriage”, the whole thrust of alchemy and kabbalah and tantra.

The left side thing-….. do you remember the dream I had that I describe in the stuff I wrote—about going down into the cathedral? Here it is again—note the line “I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time-—my first thought was ‘where’s everybody else’, and immediately I heard this voice say “they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds”. That’s what happens a lot (most) of the time when people come face to face with that left side pain and emptiness—but there are other choices than those two—unfortunately the world runs, recreates itself, and maintains itself through the coming and going of that pain, so if you really want to make those other choices you immediately find yourself at odds with the world. I personally prefer to be at odds…

(here’s the dream again:)

All of this is the process of the ‘spiritual marriage’, the ‘alchemical marriage’ in western spirituality, the ‘union of red and white’ in tantra. The most important ‘dream’ of my life is the one that explained all this to me when I was in the midst of it—perhaps I should say the ‘throes’ of it, because a lot of it was definitely a descent into hell. In the dream I was sitting with some people in a sort of court yard in an old Romanesque church —at the same time I could see the scene from overhead and I could see that there was a wing of the church that could only be seen from the air—you couldn’t tell it was there from the ground. So, on the ground, I decided to see if I could find the wing and I wandered around until I came to this descending passageway which I followed. I came to the end of the passage and there was a door at the end and I started towards it when this large ‘dragon’ suddenly appeared as a sort of guardian of the door and it started toward me with menacing gestures. I suddenly realized I had a large key in my left hand and that I was entitled to go through the door—I held the key up to the ‘dragon’ so show it to him, and then I walked through him as though he had become a hologram and went to the door, unlocked it and opened it and went through. The door led to the hidden wing of the church—I went down a sort of hall way and into a large round room with large pillars around the edge forming large open portals looking out into a vast blue space. In the middle of the room was a large round table. As soon as I saw the table I realized that I’d been here before and I realized that I had made it back from ‘something’. I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time—my first thought was ‘where’s everybody else’, and immediately I heard this voice say “they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds”. I said ‘I don’t get it’ and immediately remembered a dream I had had a couple of months earlier, and then I ‘re-dreamed’ that dream as if it were for the first time . In that dream I was once again going down a long passageway and came to a door at the end—as I approached the door I became more and more anxious but I sort of willed myself through it. The door was very ancient, studded with nails, and I thought ‘man, I haven’t been in here for a long time’—I finally forced the door open and went into the room, which was very dark and musty and I was still anxious so my first inclination was to make some light , so I started pulling off all these old worn out tapestries from the walls and the walls underneath were bright white. The more tapestries I yanked down the brighter the place became until finally I could see a rough rectangular table in the middle and I realized there was an opening in the ceiling of the room. I had no sooner seen that than a shaft of light came down from above the ceiling and shown on the table. Immediately in the shaft of light there was a sort of holographic image of a large chalice or cup and as soon as I saw it I said “that’s what I’ve been looking for” and jumped on the table and grabbed the image to my chest. As soon as I did that I started to go up the shaft of light with the image clasped to my chest, and the farther I went the more solid the chalice image became. Now I flipped back to the church, only I was both in the room and looking at the scene of the room on a large tv screen and there was a small blue person standing beside me and he said “now do you understand” and then reached out and fiddled with the tv image to make it sharper. As soon as it was sharp, I stepped through the screen and into the scene again. I looked out through the portals at the blue light and began to realize what I had done, and suddenly the blue light changed to this intense white and the scene began to dissolve and I dissolved with it into this overwhelming love. The end.

If you were to ask me where I got the key to unlock the door, I’d have to say that I took it from my mother when she was asleep—it was mine, and I gave it to her when I was born, but I forgot about it and thought it was hers.”

I simply cannot describe to anyone how hard it has been to navigate between the two usual choices of getting married or succumbing to self-inflicted wounds, as well as to maintain a physical existence that basically requires me to numb and disassociate myself from my true feelings and even from what I know to be true about existence. However, I seemed to have survived.

Now I find that the river of stars goes clear down to my toes. When I go to bed at night and relax my physical body I can feel it’s outline changing into the earth, becoming a body-shaped line of hills covered with green growing things of all sorts. Then it becomes open and spacious and fills up with stars and the dark blue-black of open space and the stars and the space fill my body. And then I do the “tennis ball pop” and my body becomes the first body, white and luminous—only now the blue stars pour from my whole body from head to toe instead of just from my face. And then I fall asleep.