When the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1949, peaceful and compassionate Tibetan monks were faced with unprecedented and chaotic violence. They were subject to atrocities, along with citizens. Nothing in their practices prepared them for this. Each monk surely was faced with the question, “What will I do?” having nothing from past experience to guide him or her. Some took up arms, others began to protest or engage in non-violent resistance, others self-immolated, while still others fled to India. The Chinese response was brutal. Only much later did the exiled Government organize protest into a sustained political movement. In the initial phases, emotions were the dominant basis for action. Things were moving too fast, too chaotically, and people of good conscience had to resist the dreadful momentum immediately. There is no way to judge these actions as good or bad. They always do serve, however, to deepen the chaos.
There is no doubt in my mind that, as Trump rises to ascendancy, we are all now faced with a similar crisis, though on a much larger scale, as many of us have been writing about on Facebook and beyond. I think, for example, of the courageous people fighting against the North Dakota pipeline recently—direct and effective action on behalf of the living earth. I am sure many of our community members on Facebook here are wrestling with the same issue that I am: “What do I do?” The urgency to act is pushing up through the emotions (read: unconscious wisdom of the body/world), but do what? What “doing” would be relevant to the crisis at hand?
As my emotions began to intensify and the question pulled hard on me, I had the following shocking dreams: The first one that appeared was this:
I am a policeman in my car, driving towards a child centre. I park and get out. A building of sorts. Inside is a presence of great evil. Terrifying! I am almost paralysed by it. I back away into my car and reverse as long as I can back down the road to get away.
In the face of this terror, it seems that the dream is suggesting that the forces of law and order are inadequate to the task of addressing the reality of evil. Following this nightmare I had several dreams in which I became a receiver of Love—Love poured into me unreservedly and I opened up to its redeeming power. Finally, I was shaken awake by the following dream:
I am Trump’s long-lost son. He had a one-night affair and I am the product. I gradually begin to make tentative contact via his other son (Trump jnr) who agrees to meet me in a restaurant. He knows about the affair and my existence. We are cordial. There seems to be no resistance to my approach. I also dream that Anita and I are just one step ahead running up a mountain trail, of a giant tsunami, as the water is rising,
Nothing prepared me for this dream! It broke through my growing depression and left me, as they say in Australia, gobsmacked! I could do little for the next two days. I wanted to resist the thought that I was Trump’s son in any way whatsoever! After that initial defensive posture, memories began to trickle. This is not the first time I have had a dream of this kind during a crisis. It seems that when I am outwardly filled with fears, anxieties, indecision, a dream emerges showing me as going more deeply, without fear, into the heart of the (terrifying) matter, in order to gain objective knowledge. In the 90’s for example, I dreamed of being able to pass the guards and approach a terrifying “Hitler”. But when I got close to him, I saw to my amazement that he was old and dying, a feeble old man.
This dream knowledge helped me in a time when I was in the grip of a nightmarish outer situation. I also once dreamed in 1991 that:
I saw Saddam Hussein dead. Whereas everyone else despised him and left him there to rot, I approached his body and performed the last rites for him. To my shock he comes alive again. No one wants this to happen and people start to flee. But then we learn that he has experienced a conversion and is going into the desert to fast. His tyrant days are over.
These startling dreams, each emerging at a critical time in my life, point to a need to bring in new elements to the world situation of tyrants, oppositionalism, etc. Rather than addressing tyranny or evil only through the perspective of law and order or the dark/light, good/evil conflict of opposites, or merely reacting with horror, there is another way that speaks to entering the darkness more deeply, finding its truth! Only this approach can open the possibility of the transformation of tyranny, i.e. as a psychic phenomenon.
By my being “Trump’s son”, no resistance to my approaching the centre of this particular darkness is offered. We are of the “same blood”. This image is a key clue how to get to the heart of the “Trump” matter. On a deep level of the “blood”, Trump and I are one—we are kin! “Blood ties” are shown to be stronger and more uniting than fear, aversion, protest, etc. Apparently the dream is saying, as my previous dreams did, that those who can approach on the basis of “you and I are one,” at the level of “blood”, can proceed to the centre (truth of the matter). Furthermore, the image of blood kinship suggests very strongly to me that I can find my way to the truth of “Trump” by awakening a connection to my own “life of the blood” or blood consciousness.
As I was writing this essay, another memory surfaced. I have been attracted to the stories of the Jewish mystic, The Baal Shem, for decades.[ii] There is one story, which continues to grip my imagination to this day—the story of the werewolf. An evil spirit had possessed a simple charcoal burner and the young Baal-Shem agreed to deal with this being that was terrorizing the village. So one night he went to the forest:
As he drew near, the animal burst forth; it stood in front of the trees and grew before his eyes into the heavens, so that it covered the forest with its body and the field with its claws, and the bloody drivel from its mouth flowed around the rising sun. Israel did not give way, for the word of his father was with him. It seemed to him as if he were going farther and farther and were entering into the body of the werewolf. There was no halt or hindrance to his step until he came to the dark, glowing heart, from whose mournful mirror all beings of the world were reflected, discoloured by burning hatred. He grasped the heart and closed his fingers tight around it. Then he felt it throb, saw drops of blood run down and sensed the infinite suffering that was within it from the beginning. He laid it gently on the earth, which at once swallowed it, found himself alone at the edge of the forest, breathed freely once again, and returned to the children. On the way home, they saw the charcoal burner lying dead at the edge of the forest. Those who came across him were astonished by the great peacefulness of his countenance and no longer understood the fear of him that they had experienced, for in death he appeared like a great, clumsy child.
All these dream actions that contribute to a transformation in the “tyrant phenomenon” occur of course in psychic reality (my dreams, the Baal-Shem’s visionary space). As the Baal-Shem story suggests, this inward transformation of evil does have real, empirical consequences (here the peaceful death of the charcoal burner, released from possession by evil). How can such psychic events (e.g. the transformation of “evil” or “tyranny”) become a basis for consequential, possibly transforming, action in the real world of politics, economics etc. in this time of crisis?
Transformations in the psychic background of our ordinary reality alter our perceptions of ordinary reality, if we can bring them to consciousness. And correspondingly, ordinary reality then begins to appear in a new way. When I was gifted with my Hitler dream, showing the tyrant as weak, growing old, near to dying, I drew strength from it for my outer life although I could not yet change my nightmarish circumstances. But my perceptions began to change under the influence of the dream. I began to feel that, as bad as it was, this time of “tyranny” was coming to a close and I would know when it happened. Some months later the nightmare came to an end. I knew exactly how to act, what to do, and all conflict was gone. I acted in a unified way and my outer life transformed too.
I am taking this same approach with my “Trump” dream. At this time of the “Trump” ascendancy, it seems I am to proceed in a more inward fashion for now, approaching the centre of the Trump phenomenon on the basis of a kinship bond (blood consciousness) with him. This means to me that everything about what I read or hear from him must be welcomed in the spirit of “you and I are one” i.e. nothing unfamiliar or alien to me. There is much Trump says and does that I do recognize already, in my “blood” as it were. I choose not to act out of most of the sentiments that he espouses and valorises as a way of life, but I do recognize them. I have thought those thoughts, had those feelings, held those vile judgements etc. Such recognition, without reaction, seems to be a way “in”, via blood ties, to the heart of “Trump”.
What will I find there, if I succeed? (In 2020 I found my answer)
I further develop this post in my essay Trauma and its Transformation
[ii] Buber. The Legend of the Baal-Shem. Princeton University Press. 1955
