Prophecy, Spirit and the Dreamtime: The Last Frontier
Jay Weidner
The mythology of our modern, high-tech culture teaches us that the last frontier for humanity is outer space. Somehow, according to this emerging mythos, the fragile human body is supposed to be able to survive the rigors of travel in outer space over vast distances. The writers of science fiction and Star Trek-style television shows would have us believe that human beings can somehow endure every kind of radiation and danger to successfully colonize other planets and solar systems.
But this notion is probably never going to happen. As this age ends and the next age begins humanity will lose its interest in conquering space. The last 6000 years have been spent conquering the space around us.
The last frontier of humanity is not the conquering of outer space, of other planets and solar systems. As we approach the end of this era we will realize that the last frontier is time.
Space is defined by the three dimensional reality that surrounds us. It is height, width and depth. We humans possess the most spectacular array of physical and mental abilities ever devised in creation to navigate these three dimensions. These abilities have enabled us to conquer our three-dimensional world.
Now at this critical juncture in history we discover that we have completely conquered the planet’s biosphere. People are living in the coldest environments imaginable and in the hottest tropical jungles. There are few mysteries left concerning the outer physical reality of our planet. Due to oil and cheap energy, we have been able to travel to any place on Earth. As this age of oil ends there will be only one mystery left for us to ponder.
This final mystery is the mystery of time.
Let’s take a look at our perception of time. Much of the way we experience the present moment depends on our experience of time past. The events of the past are distilled and repainted in our memories until their very reality loses its solidity. If we let them cook long enough, images of past events take on a dream like quality. Through this process, our remembrances frequently slide into a fantasy disconnected from anything tangible. How often have we encountered someone who remembers an incident in a completely opposite manner from the way we remember it? Our minds appear to be constantly rewriting history to make it more agreeable to our present day wishes. Incidents in the past that are disturbing or frightening are frequently glossed over in our memory until they disappear only to be replaced by a memory that is more easily digested by consciousness.
Our view of the future works in a similar but opposite texture. Whereas the past begins to become a dream within our memories, the future is the dream that has not yet arrived. When someone is successful in the material world we like to say that they have “lived their dreams”. This cliché reveals an intrinsic understanding that present and future reality is created from the dream state of the past.
This idea dovetails with the central belief of the Aborigines of Australia. The essential teaching from that tradition is that everything in our world begins in the Dreamtime. From their ancient perspective, every thought, every action emerges from a larger metaphysical landscape that surrounds and pervades our material world. They call this larger reality the Dreamtime. According to this tradition, each living thing first begins in the Dreamtime. After it has become fully developed in the Dreamtime it then concretizes and becomes a part of our three dimensional reality.
This process is recursive in that our future dreams are frequently constructed from the archetypes of ancient dreams. So the past and the future, the material world and the dream world work together to create not only everything that we see, feel and hear but all that we have manifested as human beings. If one looks beyond the veil of linear time, one can easily see that there is a certain control mechanism over this peculiar process. Because reality is so dependent on the dream world, it is possible to shift reality by simply shifting the dream.
Motivational speakers, politicians, television script writers, preachers and many others understand this fundamental concept and use it to re-script reality in their favor. The last thing that they want you to discover is that you have the innate ability to take control of your dreams. They much prefer that you dream their dream, live in their past and help build their future.
Just think about the nature of the media these days. Over the past century, finding new and ever more invasive means of manipulating thoughts, desires and actions have been at the forefront of the research conducted by “psychic engineers”; the advertising agencies, spin doctors, pollsters, pharmaceutical companies, and secret government agencies of our world.
Through the constant barrage of images projected by the media, through the manipulation of food, and the polluting of the atmosphere, much of humanity has become lulled into a hypnotic state and their Dreamtime is occupied with nightmares. This has led us to today, to the present moment, in which our planet and our species is in a state of crisis. To transmute this crisis, this very critical situation in time, we must learn to step outside of linear time and enter the Dreamtime, that subtle realm in which everything becomes possible.
As the word Dreamtime aptly describes, there is little difference between the dream and the time. This very moment will become a dream soon in your memory. Also you are creating the future that is racing towards you – right now.
The dream world, time and four-dimensional space are all the same thing. The fourth dimensional world, often referred to as ‘time’ by physicists, surrounds and permeates our three dimensional reality. Everything that we are is shaped and formed within this topological manifold that flows into and out of our existence. As the stream of time passes we have the ability to alter it’s course. Each moment of our lives offers us the chance to change the course of our dreams and the dreams of those we love.
Understanding this landscape, the ragged mountains and mossy valleys of the wilderness of time, is the frontier that awaits us. When we finally colonize this land and understand its many intricacies and nuances, we will realize that any future is possible. We will no longer need to be slaves to systems that require us to live in someone else’s dream. The powers of the dark sorcerers that rule our world will be overthrown and a new Dreamtime will be created. When we discover how to navigate the river of time, when the topological map of time is finally understood by us, all of the certain dangers that await us will vanish in the blink of an eye during REM sleep.
We are at the crossroads now. There is a choice. One road leads to a mechanistic, toxic, polluted, fascist nightmare from which we may never recover. The other road leads to a revitalized world where we live our dreams in freedom, prosperity and love.
One of the main aims of many ancient spiritual traditions is to provide us with the means to create a conscious break with the almost dictatorial dreams of our past. This is the essence of the teachings of the Buddah for instance. We are slaves to the dreams that we were born into, slaves to a past of which we had nothing to do. Many of these ancient spiritual traditions teach us how to break with the mental slavery that has burdened us for so long.
Humans frequently hurt themselves and others around them defending the imprinted dreams of their past and creating belief systems that make it all right to hurt and destroy people who come from a different past, a different dreamtime.
The way to stop this recurring cycle is to find our way towards a detachment from the heated beliefs and ego-inspired histories and cultures that we were born into. This is not to say that we should reject our traditions. Only that true liberation of ourselves can only begin when we detach ourselves from ingrained spiritual and cultural habits.
Right now we are trapped by time. And this means that we are trapped in a Dreamtime from which escape is nearly impossible. But as long as there is a chance, as long as the odds are not one hundred percent against us – and they are not – we should attempt to make this leap.
If we change the dream we can change the world and ourselves.
The spiritual emergence that is happening right now across the world is the realization that there is only one kind of time. There is no past and there is no future.
There is only now.
And we can change the now at any time that we like.
Image by g.originals, used through a Creative Commons license.
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Ka-pow.
This article is a bolt of lightning. Very inspirational. I feel there's something deeply symbolic about the world's dinosaur-minded governments and corporations all-consuming desire for every last drop of oil they can get. Which is pretty much the liquefied remains of the earth's primordial past.
“…there exists no intransigent opposites except in the beliefs of men. Anyone can rip aside the veil of Time. You can discover the future in the past or in your own imagination. Doing this, you win back your consciousness in your inner being. You know then that the universe is a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it.” -Frank Herbert
precognitive dreams
I have, on occasion, had dreams that I somehow know prefigure things to come. It's nothing that could ever be objectively proven or studied because these experiences are entirely subjective and open to interpretation. And it's easy to dismiss them rationally as wish fulfillment, coincidence, or the unconscious selection of dreams to fit that seem to fit with events after the fact. That said, I dreamed of planes crashing - the day before 9-11. I dreamed I was riding up a never-ending escalator that I knew symbolized life beside an unknown female companion - the night before I met the woman who would become the love of my life. I dreamed of a coming natural catastrophe slowly unfolding on TV before throngs of stunned refugees holed up in schools - a week before the most recent fires in Southern California. And over a month ago I dreamed of Barack and Michelle Obama walking hand-in-hand up white marble steps - back when his candidacy was still a considered long-shot.
These dreams all share a certain quality that is difficult to put into words. Their symbolism is clear and simple, and their meaning is transparent. They convey a sense of truthfulness and a knowledge that they represent things to come. These dreams don't reflect the events themselves rather they prefigure emotional quality surrounding the event. I no longer really question these kinds of dreams, and I don't claim any sort of power or unique ability. In fact, I think these kinds of precognitive dreams are incredibly common, though perhaps dismissed , forgotten, or rarely sahred beyond an intimate circle. In thinking about these dreams and how I experience them, I don't necessarily subscribe to the standard parapsychological notions of Psi or remote viewing or telepathy. I think it might be useful to look beyond the models based on telegraph and radio waves, as if my sleeping brain was "tuning in" to transmissions of information from the future. I wonder if instead this phenomena represents a kind of symbolic sympathy between the outer and the inner - a non-linear connection beyond linear time. It's not that my dreaming of future events cause the events to occur. There is no cause and effect relationship. The dream and the event arise together, part of the same psychic, archetypal connective tissue growing in the collective unconscious. Of course, this is exactly Jung's concept of synchronicity. The more travel down these strange roads, the more I seem to arrive independently on the path Jung blazed.
If this reality is something like a Dreamtime (and prescient dreams such as these lead me to beleive this may be so) then perhaps we are able to change the future. Or more accurately, when we open ourselves the possibility that we are dreaming the dream even as the dream is dreaming us, then life becomes a more like lucid dream than a concrete world of endless malaise and suffering. At least, I feel the potential is there.
I'm going to make another prediction. As weird as all this seems now, it's going to get a lot weirder before we're through!
i am experiencing the same
fema trailers
yeah , i saw those before they handed them out. and are toxic! i recently saw, whales or dolphins swimming in a great circle in a ragging sea a saw a gun shot the night before John Lennon was assassinated. i mean to say, the senses become disorganized tis like static filtering out and in like god's radio or the devil's radio like George say,"brainwashed" imagine no religion too...imagine a rocket to the moon, now imagine the human enterprise as an extension of alien technology, now watt is missing? is the dreamtime the missing rocket fuel, is that watt Jack Parsons was really workin on when he got the mix mixed up? how deep does the rabbit hole go? why does hollywad keep programing people with zombies and the end of the world?....where's the perpetual clockwork orange?...where is Venus plasmafire? starfire.
is there a race between the hair and the tortoise?
is uncle Remus really uncle Ra?
does Dumbo use the feather of Maat?
who deep does the blackhole go?
how far does dreamtime move ?
Is Huckleberry Finn another timewave cycleback to Finnegan's in the wake up? from the history of herstory?
do planes crash into the timewall? and a shock wave is sent so forceful that it cracks the time barrier? the sound is a din of media deaf?
beam me down the rabbit hole Scotty!!!
is this another synchronicity with the Loch Ness?
oh, we are the deep doodoo psychic mess we done made
can't clean it up with cool aid.
time is cool. cool it! listen can you hear them ghostly bagpipes or that spirit didgeridoo? is it 23 skidoo
will we become dirigible in time? will Dudly Doo rite
ack ack! come in the nick of the tick of timey time?
here he comes to save the day!
tune in, turn on, and drop out, next weak for the exciting conclusion!!!
will farrell is an alien
alien elf
narratively
actually
i guess the narrative narrows down the twists and turns of the punch of the plot in the nots.Because if truth be told, what comes first the plot or the narrative?
so , if you write a novel that is written in first person that is written from the perspective of remembering back to a time that would be reliving that moment, you create a kind of feedback effect that allows for the flow of time to slosh around like a aged wine in glass.
in my case, i never studied books on how to write or took classes on writing books.I just read a lot of books on my own , mostly, literature, poetry, philosophy, psycology, and met others that wrote poetry, ect.
so narrative is just remembering and speaking your truth.
and for me it's using that old way, like a dharma bum.
and also i always use the rule of thumb that Rimbaud used:
" one must be absolutly modern" speaking from a post modern view, now, of course.
what is dreamtime but bringing the collective unconscious up? (well you could see that all the old symbols used by the aboriginal people have been faded back to where they came.Perhaps now there is one special place left, where you could find the origin entrance.)
exploring language through language itself.Having enough distance between... not this...not that.
Narcissus Drowning
Good work Jay. The conquest of space is on my mind at the moment - I'm reading The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace by Margaret Wertheim. She notes that "cyberspace" restores the medieval perspective of space as an enclosure, a cave, rather than the modern linear infinite. Whether she considers cyberspace to be a garbled projection of repressed psyche however, I've yet to discover.
This cliché reveals an intrinsic understanding that present and future reality is created from the dream state of the past.
We might also say that the past is created from the dream state of the future and the present. There is a strong trend of poetic unorthodoxy which takes this concept seriously - Robert Graves, Peter Redgrove, Ted Hughes, William Blake, Rudolf Steiner, Stan Gooch etc have all written fascinating and plausible alternative interpretations of the past.
If we change the dream we can change the world and ourselves.
And therein lies the rub. Jung suggested that each individual psyche, or soul, is an "endlessly varied recombination of age-old components." This means that deep down we are all dreaming a slightly different dream, we are all individuals with unique destinies. But until we self-realize, until we become who we truly are and articulate that unique chord of the symphony, we are indeed prisoners of the time-lords. It may be that for many people, it will be a very close run thing, and that the selfless passionate action which consummates the sacred marriage, and liberates us into eternity, will be the last action on this plane. I sometimes wonder if there isn't a hell-realm awaiting those who have wasted their lives in narcissistic gratification and ego-babel. It may be that the heroic Burmese monks for example, ultimately got the better deal than their tormentors.
Ironic
well now
like be here now. or like Bhagwan Das said "be here now and then" it kinda makes you stop , to think the beatniks kinda got it so it's like, be cool , drop out,time out of sight out of mind,take five, tune it , turn it, on and beat on it like a bongo and be here wow, man. like
the final frontier ; cept them cats in those spacesuits are gettin all bombed on cosmic rays, and stuff.
the last frontier, enter the REalitySandwich!
...you got to pick up every stitch
Throw yout dreams into space like a kite....
Very inspirational post. Yet I am not clear about you think we might change our dreams, change the now? It's true that Buddhism has something significant to say here but its spiritual technology requires great dedication over time and I am not sure that it is that appropriate for all temeperaments (Certainly not mine).
I have been rereading the diaries, fiction and essays of Anais Nin, a writer who was very significant to me earlier in my life. She has a great deal to say about the dream ( not neccessarily those of sleep) and art as essential to life. Came across this site which has some quotes from her which give a taste of some of her thoughts on dreams
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
non-western insights
Just last night I was rereading Lama Govinda's Creative Meditation and Multidimensional Consciousness (Quest Books, 1976) in which he discusses the "Mystery of Time."
I am going to quote this amazing scholar at some length because he gives a more clear discussion of space/time than I can in short space. He says, in part, "Buddhism..is based on the direct perception of inner experience, according to which time and space are inseparable aspects of reality." And, "Both space and time are two aspects of the most fundamental quality of life: movement." His discussion is complex, but he's saying what most every meditator experiences, at least in moments:
when you enter into profound stillness, time ceases to exist
(in the way we normally perceive it)."
Thus the Buddha in the process of his enlightenment surveyed innumerable previous lives in ever widening vistas, until his vision encompassed the entire universe. Only if we recognize the past as a 'true dimension of ourselves,' and not only as an abstract property of time, shall we be able to see ourselves in proper perspective to the universe, which is not an alien element that surrounds us mysteriously, but the very body of our past, in whose womb we dream until we awake into the freedom of enlightenment."
My point is that we don't have to figure all of this time mystery our for ourselves! Many non-western traditions have addressed these issues for years. Practice makes perfect!
Meg Beeler
http://www.earthcaretakers.net
A Guilty Dreamer
Thanks for a great essay and an inspiring discussion (with many great quotes and links). This is a subject that preoccupies me greatly.
I believe that in changing our dreams -- our perception of what can be -- we can change reality. I have seen that to be the case time and again. What I'm grappling with the most right now is how to reconcile this...
"When we discover how to navigate the river of time, when the topological map of time is finally understood by us, all of the certain dangers that await us will vanish in the blink of an eye during REM sleep."
... with the fact that the destruction of the Earth may be unalterable.
I know that in dreams the impossible is possible but I don't know how to go about dreaming a healed Earth when the nightmares of its implosion are so pervasive, so dominating.
My dreaming is also impaired because I'm attached to the Earth, to my body on this Earth, to at least the intention of trying saving it and the other bodies on it from destruction. Maybe this is what I am a slave to.
I'd like it to disappear with a blink of an eye but the physical world is not part of the dream world. If we blink that eye, what happens to the physical and if the answer is indeed that it vanishes, at what point does that happen? 2012? When enough people join the bandwagon? Are we not responsible for what we leave behind? I feel guilty when I dream too long. There is so much left to do in waking life.
"spooky action at a distance"
Perhaps we no longer feel the need to "conquer" space/time but rather accept it as a landscape that we melt into. I believe dreamtime could be more than one larger reality made up of this landscape I'm referring to.
I would like to recommend Paul Davies' Cosmic Jackpot. In his book he shares his thoughts on time and the possibility of "multiverses" as well as his thoughts on answering those bigger questions about life. He also shares his knowledge on particle physics - I still can't bend my mind around the fact that a particle can exist in two places at once, yet I know I'm often in two places at once. Perhaps it's because of the cultural/spiritual habits you were mentioning. This mind clash with the I know what is real and yet I just can't believe it makes it difficult for me...
I'm not sure I want to change the dream. I like these secret messages from myself to myself whether they're coming from the landscape of everything and everything is now, or one small drip drip drip from another time and place.
Genius!!!