A little girl, 9 years old, dreams a recurring nightmare:
Monsters are chasing me through my house. I’m terrified and I race across the room to the door. I struggle to open the door but the handle is slippery or stuck. Finally I open it into another room and the monsters are chasing me again as I race to the next door.
Pema Chödren is a Western Buddhist teacher and on this particular weekend she was teaching the group about the bardo state, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She related this dream from a childhood memory. A friend of hers had this dream and the two girls discussed it later. Pema was a curious little girl and asked her friend what the monsters looked like. “ I don’t know,” she replied. “I am too scared to look around at them.” The next night the dream returned as usual. As she was running across the room in a panic, she remembered what Pema had said and glanced back. To her astonishment, the monsters began to change form, becoming less substantial until they finally dissolved.
Pema recounted this memory as a way of addressing the fears that a dead person will have in the Bardo state, that state of consciousness between death and new birth. When we encounter fearful and intense figures in the bardo, if we can lean into them rather than fleeing, then we will enter an enlightened state, according to Pema. In this way she used the dream as an illustration in the service of teaching about some features of the bardo state.
At this time, in our time, our time of crisis, I felt a wave of sadness in hearing this dream. We are sent so many clues, hints, even appeals, through our dreams, of a way through our crisis to a “new world”, a new way of being. We only have to think the hints and most important, act in relation to what we think, i.e. the dream’s “thinking”. Such dreams as this little girl’s can become so much more than an illustration of a canonical system founded thousands of years ago. They can become initiatory, taking us into the future and a new way of being, i.e. if we act!
The most obvious feature of the dream to consider lies in the dream fact that the dreamer turned around and faced her monsters, which promptly dissolved. Buddhism would surely understand this remarkable phenomenon in terms of “dependent co-arising”—no entity has independent existence from consciousness. The monsters arise only in relation to the panicky flight of the dreamer. When she is fleeing in terror, the monsters chase her or, when the monsters chase her, she flees in terror, as Hillman would say. When one pole of this dialectic changes (fear to cautious curiosity) the monsters are discovered to be empty of inherent existence. They dissolve.
The West is catching up to this ancient wisdom in our modern theory. We well understand now, from many disciplines, that consciousness and perception are in a relationship of correspondence (e.g. phenomenology’s “intentionality”)—concept and percept, etc.
However, all our present cultural practices, i.e. the way we conduct our lives in actuality, reflects a stubborn and incorrigible belief in a world of entities each existing independently of our consciousness. Our influential and determinative picture of evolution, for example, utterly depends of the habit of thought that subject and object are independent. We act as though the appearances that came into existence in the 19th century, along with their corresponding style of consciousness, are the only correspondences to be had for all time, notwithstanding our clear theoretical knowledge of very different forms of past consciousnesses and their equally real but very different appearances.
The wisdom in dreams such as the one above just cannot penetrate this encrusted habit of thought, along with its manifold cultural practices and beliefs reinforcing it at every turn, taking us all, finally, to the brink of catastrophe.
How could we conduct our lives in practical terms if we were initiated by such dreams into the thinking that no entity exists independently of consciousness? This is the task set us by our dreams and we simply do not take up such a task because of the consequences—wholesale destruction of all those cultural practices and institutions that utterly depend on the belief of independent existence of entities. For example, we simply could not destroy the environment if we FELT such destruction to be also our own destruction. We only know theoretically that we are destroying ourselves. We mostly (so far) perceive a stable world that is going on pretty much as before.[1]
There is another equally powerful hint or gift in the dream—one that may be more easily overlooked. The dreamer, in the dream, remembered what the nine-year-old Pema had said while they were discussing the dream in waking life! I have had similar dreams in which I remember what I had learned in a previous dream upon awakening. The question for modern consciousness, which insists on a disjunction between self/object, inner/outer, etc., is this: how did the dream ego remember an event that occurred in waking life? How did the “outer” event turn up in the “inner” world? This question is just one form of emerging anomalies that are turning up to bedevil the modern disjunctive mind. For example, neuroscience will never answer the question of how a neuron (matter) becomes a thought (spirit) because the style of consciousness (disjunctive) asking the question is producing the very split it is trying to heal.
For another form of consciousness, the question of how the outer event becomes an inner one simply does not arise, because inner/outer are no longer disjunctive. In other words, this little dream can become initiatory, taking the dreamer from our habitual form of consciousness to another with its new set of real appearances in the world, along with, possibly, an entirely new set of cultural practices that reflect and support these new appearances.
But, it’s easier to just let the dream go back into oblivion. Another gift refused in favor of fear escalating into terror! Owen Barfield speaks of the terror now upon us as we sense the threat to our current style of disjunctive consciousness from the emerging new style of consciousness:
Let us nevertheless suppose that the resistances are eventually overcome and try to imagine a second stage of transition. This surely must be a climate of extreme depression amounting in many quarters to despair. . . I am simply forced to envisage an epidemic of something like nervous breakdowns, with probably some suicides, within such solid fortresses of conformity as MIT or the London School of Economics and amongst their alumni.[2]
Pema tells her audience of a supreme danger while in the bardo state. Wisdom bodies in the form of intense light and sound visit us. There is one light that is a cozy little blue light, soft, and inviting. If we turn in fear from the dazzling displays towards the little light of comfort, we miss our chance at enlightenment. Buddhist wisdom goes on to speak of further opportunities arising but, given our present crisis I wonder how many chances we have to be given before what ever Grace is sending these gifts simply stops doing so.
Is our “comfort” with the familiar worth that risk?
It seems so!
[1] Those suffering in the thick of destructive forces, which are in their faces, so to speak, of one kind or another in the world, are of course in a very different situation.
[2] Owen Barfield: “The Trauma of Materialism” in Rediscovery of Meaning, 198.
