You’re afraid of the imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.
Murakami: Kafka on the Shore
This speech is directed at the young protagonist but, as with all great literature, carries a message to us all. I have previously written about the all-out terminal assault on the imagination or psyche via our dominant cultural practices and beliefs, i.e. in the way we live our daily lives, not by what we may privately believe. For example we may privately believe that all things are connected but that belief only becomes truth when we perceive things through an imaginal perspective. All things being connected depends on our participation with what we see and that can only happen when the imagination is engaged with the perception. Nothing in our current way of living supports this kind of engagement anymore. If it did, aesthetic responses to the horrors of our current way of life would be enough to initiate political or economic action. But this does not happen of course.
An aesthetic response has a moral aspect and a feeling aspect, held together in the imagination and torn apart in our world governed by sheer difference—our post-modern world! This is what Murakami is getting at when he says that responsibility begins in dreams. He is talking about a readily accessible world where simultaneity rules, not opposites degraded into post-modern “difference”. The easiest way to avoid responsibility, then, is to avoid dreams and dreaming altogether.
In a moral universe, everything shows up as mattering or as significant to us. In a feeling universe, we are related to other beings on the basis of attraction or repulsion (beauty and ugliness, for example). Steiner calls this basic soul process sympathy and antipathy. Amazingly this universe or cosmos still governs the nightly happenings within dreams. In the dream we still experience a hierarchy of values, and dream appearances evoke strong feeling responses—a moral cosmos, and so responsibility indeed begins there.
If we suppress the imagination as Murakami says, then we suppress our moral/feeling response to the world and other inhabitants of the world. I don’t think there is any need to cite evidence for this accelerating trend, now being named as imminent fascism by the media.
For those of us who still attend to dreams and the responsibility that lies within them there is an almost insurmountable difficulty. C. G. Jung refers to this responsibility in terms of the Self. Once the dreamer is drawn, more or less consciously, into participation with the processes of the Self, she begins to feel a growing sense of a mandated task. In order to engage life responsibly i.e. as being responsible to the often uncanny psychic other, as well as to the ordinary tasks of our waking lives, the dreamer more often than not finds a conflict of duties. This conflict is felt most keenly today by individual dreamers as a result of our current collective erasure of the imagination as a vehicle of perception, the only vehicle we have for experiencing the interconnectedness of all things. Without the imagination, things fall apart as Yeats prophesied. This is our almost insurmountable difficulty today–how to bring the imaginal perspective into relationship with the materialistic post-modern world which increasingly only accedes to the literal.
The generation of a task given us by the “dream maker” can be felt by the dreamer as overwhelming, leading at first to an inflation/deflation cycle: “I am the chosen one” or “I am not worthy”, etc. This cycle is crucial for drawing us into participation with the overpowering energies of what lies beyond ordinary waking consciousness. Our participation is required in order to initiate the incarnation of some aspect of the mystery that lies “beyond”—apparently the mystery “wants” to incarnate—its desire if you like. The almost insurmountable difficulty for the dreamer lies in how to respond to this imperative or task responsibly in the context of our postmodern world now at the edge of a precipice threatening all species.
At one time, the emergence of prophets, oracles, people bringing the news of imminent disaster, or of the eternal mystery etc, was tolerated by the culture. I have seen in India for example, naked men with a trident and three white stripes across their foreheads raving through the streets of Varanasi. The question of an inflationary cycle does not arise. In our time, participation in the task of incarnation of what lies “beyond”—call it the unknown future or the Coming Guest, after Jung—carries unique problems for the dreamer who knows responsibility begins in the dream, as Murakami says.
I had this dream once (1995):
I am India as an advisor to Gandhi. We are in Benares, the Holy City. he doesn’t know what to do. I didn’t know either but I acted on an intuition: “What do you do at any time in Benares?” He smiles and nods. He now knows what to do. Later on, I am asked to leave, take my things, go. As we leave the house, the others scatter and I am alone in a foreign city. A feeling of being utterly isolated. No longer advisor to Gandhi who has his own destiny. No longer associated with the Man of Destiny, alienated, in a foreign country. Separated from the one who is to become the GREAT SOUL, Mahatma. I experience great alienation—I need to attend to my personal effects. The Man of Destiny goes off to do great things. I remain behind, alone, isolated, not much of a personal life left. But I do now have one, in contrast to being his advisor where i had none.
It is now easy for me to see the inflation/deflation cycle at work in this dream along with the sense of a task generated in the dream. But it also shows that a distinction needs to be made between the tasks of ordinary life and those tasks belonging to the “Master’s destiny”, quite unlike the Shivaite who simply becomes Shiva in ordinary life, and is supported by the culture that wishes to perceive Shiva appearing in ordinary life in His eternal guise. The individual person’s ego interests are not relevant at all.
Our moral and spiritual task today, as generated from within our modern dreams, is to assist in the incarnation of the unseen other into our modern ordinary life, where the ordinary and extraordinary are now culturally so dreadfully split, in order that life can once again appear as ordinary/extraordinary, as it was “meant” to be from the beginning. Our human assistance is the task Imposed on the modern dreamer who dares connect with the mysterious other within.
