I was thinking of how to talk to a friend of mine about a dream she had. She’s not too familiar with Jung and the process of Jungian dreamwork so I have to take out all the jargon and give it to a more familiar form. The truth is the dream is always in multiple layers, some are easy to grasp and some might remain forever illusive. The top layer usually pertains to our external life, though not always, but the deeper we go into the dream only one topic remains and that’s our self in all our vagaries and varieties. It’s the millions of little threads that connect all the pieces of who we are in a collective and cosmic sense. At that level of the dream all the aspects we dream of are our self and the work of integrating the different pieces.

All of these unseen, unknown, and sometimes unwanted aspects of ourselves come out to play in the dream looking for their home within us. Deciphering what they have to say is dreamwork and it teaches us the lessons that need learning and helps us grow in consciousness. This is how we reclaim the pieces of our self that are hidden and difficult to see. We are tending the growth to wholeness.

This got me thinking about Maharishi and the Transcendental Meditation movement. He gave a talk on the idea of unity consciousness which is an awakening to full consciousness or what we generally term as enlightenment. Here it is meditation that leads us to greater awareness. Just like the dream, meditation has levels and layers and the deeper we go the more we find everything has always been within us, just in unseen and unrecognized ways. At some level of understanding the entire phenomenal world is within us. Perhaps it has to do with the deep and abiding interconnection between everything and everyone. It may sound weird and seem like a foreign idea but we see it around us all the time, strange and unusual ideas we had no previous knowledge of come around and somehow make perfect internal sense.

We may like the feeling of knowing for sure and try to concretize these illusive ideas but often it is a gut feeling, an instinct, or an unexplainable resonance that directs us to the truth. This is what we have to follow to finally see what’s real. Lately I’ve been feeling the world within me. My body feels the howl of the dog in the neighbors yard, the slippery shimmer of a running stream, or the song of the crickets. In some way or another all of life resides and reverberates within each of us. That connection of what’s on the inside to what exists outside is as true as anything else in the day to day world.

I think this is what Jungian dreamwork hints at and why enlightenment remains such an illusive term. We have to go down deep to have an inkling of it’s greater meaning, deeper than what first makes sense. At some level all the dream world is within us too, it’s another layer of us and a hint as to what the mystics are talking about. The quest for enlightenment comes by looking inside, there we find the world. This is the world of the self in fullness and wholeness with all the connections completed.

These two avenues are the same, they each look in the mirror and see the other reflected. The how of getting there is not as important as beginning to look. All things in one thing. Every layer deeper that we go has a lesson to unlock. We are made up of atoms after all, deceptively small but containing immense power. We just have to tap into it in a way that releases all of our potential energy. This energy allows us to see more clearly the reality of what is in front of us and within us.

Dreamwork is the mystics work. It’s the same business of getting down to the simplest level where everything is rooted in the same ground.

That’s where we find the truth of ourselves.

kb