Richard: I am a non-embodied observer of horrific battlefield mayhem. Then this terrible scene is peeled away as though it were a flat screen or a page in a book, and my awareness suddenly moves up and out of the dream, into a dimension that has a powerful, shimmering, vibrating quality. I am in a state of exceedingly lucid hyper-awareness.

I experience myself as a spherical consciousness, yet without manifest form. There is no sense of “other”, no one and no thing outside of this consciousness that I am.

There seem to be two modes in which “I am”: rest and movement. When I am at rest, I simply am: undifferentiated infinite bliss. When I am in movement, I am playing. With “my mind,” I manipulate a code.This is not unlike being a juggler.The manipulations result in structures that are not physical, but which are nonetheless something like a crystalline lattice. These don’t do anything, yet while I am creating them, I am simultaneously “in” them, experiencing their intricate, luminous, delicate beauty. This play is endlessly varied and wonderful fun! (As Richard, the observer, I think: “The code is like DNA, or the I Ching.”)

Then, as I am playing with a particular structure, I become aware that it is rapidly becoming too dense, and I am becoming trapped in it. I know directly through this experience that creating density - matter - is a bad idea. Even though I have no lungs, the sensation generated is like that of suffocation. The matter weighs on me and diminishes the sense of lightness and expansive heart-opening that the non-material play engenders.

This first material structure is not too elaborate, and I can easily find my way out of it. But later, I inadvertantly begin to create some very complex matter that I’m unable to find my way out of, and I grow terribly afraid. At some point, in one of these dense structures, I look down and see a wiggly thread, and know I can follow it and find my way out- which is what I do. I can relax. My play becomes happy and light again. I don’t have to worry about accidentally creating a dense, material structure because now I know how to get out of it if I do.

This playing goes on for a long time. Then everything changes. Where before I had existed in undifferentiated infinity, now I have the feeling of being contained in a bounded space. I am in something like a room, and am no longer alone. I am with a group of other “coders,” and our activity no longer is play. Something, someone, is forcing us to create matter. It feels dark. It feels wrong. It is as though coding is in our nature, and we do it automatically, but by working in this bounded space the codes inevitably result in the creation of matter. I am very distressed. The being who brought us here is not visible to us. I sense him (and it’s definitely a him) as a shadowy being “over there” - somewhere nearby, but not actually with us.

After awhile, some of the being’s helpers take me to another contained space, where I am alone and am supposed to rest. Again later, they return me to the coding room and I am put back to work. All I can see are the other coders and the matter we are creating. The being and his helpers appear only as a dark presence in my peripheral vision, yet they seem to have full control over us. This goes on for sometime.

Then one time when I am being escorted back to the coding room, I have a realization. There is something crucial they don’t know about us. It has to do with the mutual exclusivity of our ways of seeing. We can’t see them except as peripheral shadows, and they can’t see us unless we are creating matter. When we are not creating matter, we have to be contained in a “room” with finite boundaries, otherwise we are lost to them. Then I knew that if I did not create anything, I would be invisible to them and could escape.

The next thing I know, I am free. I am not, however, back in my original blissful state. I am in a space between two worlds. Straight ahead I stare into infinity. In my right peripheral vision, I can see the place from which I’ve just escaped.

In my left peripheral vision, I see a cable, like an umbilical cord, snaking downward a long, long way, and connecting to a globe that is covered with bright points of light. This is my first perception of light as light. Light-ness and a sort of invisible radiance are qualities that belong to me. But light as phenomenon is new to me. I know this light-covered globe is Earth and that my only hope for freedom lies here. It is clear that light is the only thing that can defeat my tormentor. And while the earth is not inherently light, through some kind of transformation, it is possible to produce and accumulate light there. This is the only weapon available to vanquish the forces of darkness, which is necessary if I’m ever to return home to the original Oneness.

The recognition that escaping to Earth is the only option I have, produces enormous anxiety. The earth is, after all, a locus of the maximum density of matter. I greatly fear that if I incarnate, I will forget all the knowledge I now possess, and be buried in matter and unable to find my way out. In my earlier days, I had learned to thread my way out of material structures. What if I forget how to do this and became trapped? Then I hear a voice saying, “If you can’t find the thread, follow the music.” I hear one note on a saxophone played with the maximum expression of overtones. That is enough; the anxiety fades. I know I can remember that one note. But the voice continues, “And if not music, then art.” Now I am confident, certain I can remember these two “threads.” I move into the cable and begin my descent. I am heading for Earth.

Anita: Do you remember anything of what followed your descent?

RP: As I was passing down the cable, for a short time I was in possession of both my coder consciousness and that of an incarnated being. My first thought was “What an incredible reality lies behind language. Jung barely touched the tip of the iceberg!” [Laughs] Next I thought, “This planet is populated by beings who, like me, are fleeing the Lord of Darkness. We don’t really belong here.” And finally, reflecting on my experiences in these other dimensions, I thought, “Mathematics has got dimensional realities all wrong.” I couldn’t begin to say what this last thought means now, but it was clear as a bell at the time! Then I arrived at Earth and awakened from the dream. A very lucid state of awareness remained with me for several hours.

AD: The long, winding cable connecting the cosmic realm and the earthly realm sounds like an image of the spiral vine or twisting ladder that indigenous shamans report seeing as connecting the invisible world with the visible one. Jacob’s ladder is a comparable image. An anthropologist has recently made a case for this ladder being DNA itself - the spiral helix - and this has resonance with the early part of your dream, in which playing with a code is what you do when you’re not simply be-ing. The DNA in a single human body, laid out end to end, is 125 billion miles long. Now that’s a long cable!

RP: And it’s a cable in which the Logos is embedded, so it makes sense that it would be the portal to the incarnate realm. Fascinating...

AD: You talk about “the Lord of Darkness” and “the forces of darkness” in this dream. They’re not terms I’ve heard you use before.

RP: No, this is definitely new to me, to consider Earth as populated by beings in flight from enslavement by some sort of lord of darkness.

AD: The dream is very much like the Gnostic myths, in that sense; the idea that Creative Wisdom is enslaved by the demiurge of the material realm, and forced to do his bidding. And the myths of certain aboriginal peoples carry this image of the life force arriving on Earth through the agency of invisible intelligences seeking escape from an enemy in “space”. In their cosmology, the myriad forms of life are fabricated as hiding places.

RP: It sheds new meaning on Hexagram 36 [of the I Ching, a book that Richard and I share a deep interest in. Hexagram36 is called “Darkening of the Light” in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation and “Concealment of Illumination” in the Cleary translation] : “Thus does the superior person live with the great mass. He veils his light, yet still it shines.” The whole thrust of the hexagram is to provide instruction on how to persevere in times of outer darkness, like the condition that the coder faced, but also like the increasingly dense, materialistic times in which we live. Basically it comes down to the need to hold with steadfast resolve to one’s inner light, while not allowing it to be at all discernable from the outside. There is a sense of preserving the light for the future. The inner light is veiled, but not extinguished.

AD: The second line of that hexagram says: “Darkening of the light injures him in the thigh. He gives aid with the strength of a horse.” Wilhelm comments that in this situation, the Lord of Light is wounded by the Lord of Darkness, but that the wound is not fatal; it’s only a hindrance. The image of the Lord of Light being injured in the thigh is like the Grail myths involving the Fisher King, whose thigh wound is a picture of his own injured light and the blight that shadows the world as a result. Is there any sense in the dream of who the Lord of Darkness is?

RP: Apart from the fact that he is so fundamentally “other”, and interestingly, clearly masculine, I don’t know who he is or why he suddenly appears in the formerly undifferentiated state. If I had to guess, I’d say he was a coder, like myself, who, however, was not put off by the stultifying effects of creating matter - was perhaps intrigued by the novel possibilities it presented. Or, maybe more likely, he inadvertantly created a too-dense structure and then couldn’t find his way out. He passed the point of no return.

AD: It’s fascinating that he apparently loses his own creative capacity in this process, and must enslave others to realize his desires. The dark force appears to be inherently non-creative. It must capture light from outside itself for the creation of matter. According to the dream, light, under the influence of darkness, generates matter. That would seem to imply that if light is wholly successful in concealing itself, then evil or darkness would of necessity give way, for lack of fuel.

RP: Darkness finally succumbing for a lack of fuel, as you put it, is also imaged in Hexagram 36, in the last line, where the ultimate fate of evil is described: “...it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must fall when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.”

AD: Does this mean that only when all light has been destroyed will evil cease to exist?

RP: Light can’t be destroyed. That was something I knew in the dream. I couldn’t be destroyed, only confined against my will. And that confinement constituted suffering. I could generate light-filled structures out of my own substance, but “my” substance was what IS, prior to any creation. It’s like a jeweler fashioning a gold ornament from molten gold. She hasn’t actually created more gold; she’s just given it a different shape temporarily.

AD: Then darkness perishing through wholly consuming the light means what? ... Ah! As I was saying that, I suddenly envisioned Hexagram 23.

RP: Yeah! There it is. Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart. Five dark lines rising from the bottom, about to undermine the last remaining light line. But that last line is understood to carry the seed of the future within it. It shows the ultimate invincibility of the light principle by comparing it to a fruit. When a fruit has been completely overcome by decay, its seeds are released for the future.

AD: You know, I’m wondering if the fear you experienced in the dream is the fear of “going over to the dark side,” to use the Star Wars phrase. There was dread associated with your early, inadvertent forays into the creation of matter. These were mistakes, and yet there was dread connected with them. Later, there is dread about the possibility that you will forget your true nature when you enter the earth plane. Does that suggest an inherently moral perspective in the pre-incarnate state? It’s as though nothing is more important than the preservation of fundamental integrity - as though everything somehow rests on this. Integrity is fidelity to the whole, to unity. But, if light is invincible, what does going over to the dark side really mean?

RP: It means forgetting who I am, forgetting I AM light. From the perspective of the coder at play in the fields of the Lord, so to speak, no fate could be more dreadful. I guess that’s why compassion is so natural to the awakened ones, the saints and bodhisattvas. They “see” the light inside the one who has forgotten his true nature, and know the terrible suffering that accompanies that forgetting.

AD: When Jesus says, “Resist not evil,” he’s saying “Don’t go over to the dark side. When you resist evil on its own terms - an eye for an eye - you become it. When you employ the means of evil in order to overcome it, it has already overcome you. You have forgotten who you are.” So he says: turn the other cheek. If your enemy takes your coat, give him your shirt, too.

RP: It goes so against the grain. We’re supposed to fight for our rights!

AD: His instruction is exquisitely subversive, not only because, by giving your enemy nothing to fight against, his opposition collapses. Even more importantly, it provides the enemy with the opportunity to awaken to his true nature. It’s just so discontinuous with the momentum of aggression that it pulls him up short. It creates a gap in his blind activity that may be just large enough for him to stop and say to himself, “Hey, wait a minute. What am I doing? Who am I being?” It has the potential, in other words, for presenting him with a choice he didn’t know he had: to BE the light that he has forgotten he is.

You know, Richard, I’m viewing the dream with a sort of bifocal vision, in which it is both a sort of pre-creation myth, and a description of the fall from unified consciousness that every human being undergoes. The words of the Third Zen Patriarch come to mind: “The Great Way is easy for those who are not attached to their preferences. When clinging and aversion are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.” When the dream opened, you had two modes of being, rest and play. Rest corresponds to the state of consciousness in which there are no distinctions, no preferences, no things. But in the play mode, the creating mode, some created things feel “good” and some feel “bad”. Duality has come into being. You teach yourself to avoid what feels bad and pursue what feels good. In doing this, are we inadvertantly creating a shadow reality of the rejected products of our own mind? I mean, these are creations, after all. Where do they go? Could it be that that shadow reality ultimately becomes the enslaver - divorced from the creative capacity and yet voracious for “things”? Is it possible that the dream is picturing the birth of the ego, in all its demigod glory? Of course, it’s a collective process, too. You’re brought to join lots of other coders in their enslavement to the shadowy demigod. It makes me wonder: we talk about a World Soul; what about a World Ego?

RP: You’re saying the collective darkness which we call Evil is the World Ego?

AD: Could it be? We’re talking about a structure within the collective consciousness that believes itself to be autonomous and fundamentally separated from wholeness, and behaves accordingly. Sounds like ego. I’m suggesting that the collective ego has been gradually built up over millennia upon millenia of individuals’ small and not-so-small trangressions of integrity.

RP: Jungians would call that the Shadow, as distinct from the Ego.

AD: Shadow and ego are not separate phenomena. Ego naturally sees Shadow as something separate, as not I. Ego separates; that’s what it does. But what shadow exists independently of that which casts the shadow? We could just as well say that the wave is separate from the ocean. We’re at a point now where this World Ego threatens all life. Multinational corporations and governments, the outer forms of the World Ego, are murdering the soul of the world, and though we all know it, we feel helpless, as individuals, to effectively contain what has been unleashed. What is the way out of this impasse?

RP: Music and art are the Ariadne threads offered by the dream. They seem paltry means in view of what we are describing. But isn’t it because music and art are themselves teetering on the brink of extinction in these artificially-lighted times, that they appear too weak to be of use? Instead of art, we have “aesthetic management,” as business types put it. All the true forms are being subsumed and consumed by the World Ego, and you’re right: helplessness is the path of least resistance.

AD: We can Prozac away our feelings of helplessness, or we can grasp the thread that leads out of the labyrinth we have created.

RP: As a musician, I know beyond doubting that music restores the natural harmony between spirit and soul. So many times I have come out of some communal musical experience feeling utterly in love with the whole world. And not abstractly: these people surrounding me, and by extension the whole world. All true art does this. It leads awareness back to the eternal and invincible radiance at the heart of the world. At the heart of ourselves. So, we can’t measure the apparent outer insufficiency of music and art against the arrogant grandiosity of the World Ego, which is essentially empty - like the Wizard of Oz.

AD: That’s a worthwhile image to bear in mind, because as we're talking I keep coming around to the idea that our enemy is our greatest teacher. The Wizard of Oz, fraud though he was discovered to be, did place Dorothy on the path that ultimately took her “home.” Going home is what you, as the original, spherical consciousness, are seeking. It’s what brings you into the earth plane, terrifying as that prospect may be. You know that, somehow, successfully engaging with the work of this dimension will create the conditions that will restore you to the undifferentiated, infinite unity which precedes, succeeds (and eternally supercedes!) the duality into which you have fallen.

Here’s something interesting though, that we’ve almost let slip by. The voice said: “If you can’t find the thread, then music. And if not music, then art.” This implies that the thread, whatever it is, is the primary and most reliable way back to unity. But apparently it is also the most difficult to discern, because music and art are provided as backup. What do you think the thread is?

RP: Good question... I want to say: relationship.

AD: Ah... I think you’re on to something. To relate is “to bring back” in its root meaning .

RP: Humpty Dumpty is broken; the primal unity is shattered into parts. The way to heal - to make whole again, which is to “go home” - is through relating the parts to each other. To imaginatively re-member the world. To voluntarily work on relatedness, not only human to human, but human to all creation.

AD: Nobody told us as children that Humpty Dumpty is the cosmic egg! No wonder all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Worldly power is impotent in this work. It’s heart-and-soul work within and between individuals, that brings all the pieces back into wholeness. But, you know, the essential quality of being upon which this work depends is something that could only have existed as an idea in the unbroken cosmic egg, if at all. There was no need for it there, because there was no “other.” This quality literally has to be created and renewed daily by every individual engaged in the great work, in order for the work to proceed.

RP: You're talking about love? Compassion?

AD: Duality, the dreaded fall from Unity, must be what allows Infinite Being to know compassionate love.

© Anita Doyle, 1999

* * * *

RICHARD PAUP is an art photographer, jazz musician, mathematician and longtime student of the I Ching and Tarot, who lives in Western Montana.

Anita Doyle has been a certified transpersonal counselor and educator since 1983. She has a fulltime practice in soul-centered, evolutionary astrology and dreamwork, and has been a student of meditation and the I Ching for over 30 years. Her writing has appeared in Tricycle:The Buddhist Review, Parabola, The Dream Network Journal, Northern Lights and other national publications. She completed graduate studies in medicine at the University of Colorado, and is a diplomate of the Steven Forrest program in evolutionary astrology. Anita also served as a founding member and director of the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center in Missoula, Montana. To inquire about personal consultations and tutorials, or for further info, visit her website: www.integralbeing.org or click on one of the links at the bottom of this page.

References:

Narby, J. The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Human Language. G.B. Putnam’s Sons, 1998.

Wilhelm, R. and Baynes, C. (trans.), The I Ching. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.

Cleary, T. The Taoist I Ching. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1986

About the image above: This unusual galaxy was discovered in 1950 by astronomer Art Hoag. Hoag thought the smoke-ring-like object resembled a planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a Sun-like star. But he quickly discounted that possibility, suggesting that the mysterious object was most likely a galaxy. Observations in the 1970s confirmed this prediction, though many of the details of Hoag's galaxy remain a mystery.

The galaxy is 600 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 took this image on July 9, 2001.

Image Credit:NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: Ray A. Lucas (STScI/AURA)

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