by Gloria | Mar 27, 2017 | A Course in Miracles, Dreams, Jungian Psychology
Gloria and Bessie 1983
…the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life…
~CG Jung Individual Dream Symbolism… CW 12: §92
I worked through this dream with Jane Teresa Anderson in the early days of her dream show podcast (link), way back in August 2009. It has taken all this time to unfold fully and though I am in a much better emotional space than I was when I had the dream, meeting the challenge I set myself in it is still a work in progress.
The dream:
I am in the study of my house with Mary. As we come out of the study, I notice water on the floor. I point it out to her so she won’t step in it. When we reach the dining room I see there is a large puddle of water also pooled on the carpet by the table. I notice an empty glass in the place where I usually sit for meals. I get a mental image of someone picking up the glass, and without realising it is full, spilling it and leaving the trail. I know that ‘someone’ is me but don’t recall doing it. The trail of water leads back to the study through the kitchen and family room to where I first noticed it.
I fetch a towel from the laundry basket and while I’m on my knees mopping up the water on the carpet, I tell Mary about Frank Sinatra’s rejection by his mother. She bursts into tears and I stand and put my arms around her and she cries on my shoulder. She says it reminds her of the way her mother rejected her. I say I am not surprised and then say very gently but clearly: ‘You can’t find love outside yourself, not even from your mother, you’ve got to find the source of love within yourself and connect with that.’
Using the concept of all dream characters representing aspects of the dreamer, Jane and I explored the idea that Mary’s emotional outburst represented some unresolved grief in me concerning my mother’s rejection. This did fit for Mary’s relationship with her mother but I couldn’t relate to it, as I didn’t perceive my mother as being rejecting. As we explored the issue further, I concluded that perhaps my child’s mind had perceived her frequent absences through physical illness and nervous breakdowns as a form of rejection and we let it go at that and went on to explore other aspects of the dream imagery. Days later, the memory of a very traumatic estrangement from my mother that had occurred almost 30 years before, surfaced from the depths and the scene with Mary made total sense.
The estrangement occurred as part of the fallout from my disclosure about the sexual abuse that had occurred throughout my childhood at the hands of an uncle – the husband of Mum’s sister. Although my mother and my aunt were the only ones I had spoken to, somehow word got around and all hell broke loose in the family. It emerged that this uncle’s activities were not only very widespread but also well known. In spite of that, I was branded a troublemaker and a liar and treated like a pariah by all except my sisters. I became the family scapegoat. It’s an all too common scenario for anyone who rocks the boat by speaking up and a powerful deterrent that perpetrators and their enablers exploit. Mum didn’t speak to me for 9 months and when she did reconnect, the subject was never discussed.
When she finally rang me, she broke the ice with the sad news that her precious dog had to be put down. She had been very attached to him and perhaps losing him made her reflect on our estrangement. When that topic was exhausted, she asked if I’d heard Anne Murray’s latest album. We were both big fans. I hadn’t and she told me it was called ‘I’ll Always Love You.’ I knew it was her way of saying what she was never able to say directly and this, together with the news of Sooty’s death and the fact that she was talking to me again had me blubbering like a baby. When I got hold of the album and heard the title song, I played it over and over. It was almost worth all the pain I had been through to hear the opening lines:
Standing by my window, listening for your call
Seems I really miss you after all
Time won’t let me keep these sad thoughts to myself
I’d just like to let you know, I wish I’d never let you go and…
I’ll always love you, deep inside this heart of mine
I do love you…
When I went to see her, we both carefully avoided the dreaded topic but as I was leaving she said to me “I know I’ve been a bad mother, Gloria.” I didn’t know what to say and her words haunted me for years. I wanted to put my arms around her and comfort her and tell her how much I loved her but sadly she was not comfortable with such behaviour and I knew where to draw the line. I also felt that she somehow needed to make that confession for her own benefit and I didn’t want to take that away from her. She wasn’t a bad mother – bad mothers are the kind that hate their kids and want them dead, like so many stepmothers in myths and fairy tales. She was, though, a Puella Aeternus – an eternal child – who in one sense make good mothers because they can relate to the child on their own terms but on the other hand lack the emotional maturity necessary to handle the responsibility entailed in raising children. She was basically unsuited to a role that was her lot as a woman of her time and place and had the added misfortune of marrying a man whose alcoholism led to him abandoning her to the sole responsibility of raising their five children. The odds were stacked against her in so many ways.
Our relationship pretty much picked up where we had left off and Mum died a few years afterwards. Until this dream, I hadn’t realised how much guilt I had been carrying over telling her about the abuse. As kids we were trained to be good girls and not to worry Mum, with the unspoken threat that to do so would result in her going away yet again. From my uncle I was warned not to tell ‘our little secret’ or else I would go to jail and so would he. Together with upsetting Mum, the thought that I would be responsible for his family being without a father and thereby suffering the same fate as mine was enough to keep me silent until I was 30. After the avalanche of hostility that was unleashed on me then, I closed down for another 20 years, until the death of my husband and the many life changes it entailed brought it to the surface with a vengeance. This dream – and many, many others – was a part of the healing process both of the childhood abuse and the trauma that occurred through my disclosure as an adult.
As I worked through the dream with Jane, we looked at the significance of the reference to Frank Sinatra. A few days before the dream, I had read an article about him in which he had stated that he hated the song My Way and that the only reason he did it was because his fans requested it and that it didn’t reflect his attitude at all. Following the thread of the mother theme we explored the idea that children have to go their own way and that made sense in the context of the dream but again it was only later that I recalled a vital piece of information that was a further key to understanding the dream within the context of the mother complex.
One of the most efficient entries into a dream is to consider what might have occurred in the day or two prior to the dream. We had discussed the article about Frank Sinatra but as interesting as that was, it didn’t have any real emotional charge to it. What did have a charge though and totally relevant to this dream was that the night before I had it, I had decided spontaneously to stop going to a Zen style meditation group I had been attending for about 15 months and had emailed the teacher to let her know. This was a very difficult decision to make because I had a deep affection for her. I had no doubt of her sincerity but was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with what I perceived as a lack of psychological awareness and the attitude that meditation practice alone is ‘the way.’ Several weeks after I stopped going, I woke up in the early hours one morning and had an almost desperate yearning to see her again. As I explored the intensity of the feeling, I recognised that it was the same kind of feeling I used to have at being separated from Mum when I was young. I knew then that separating from the teacher was another necessary step in loosening the attachment bonds of the mother complex.
One aspect of the dream analysis I did with Jane that I was never fully satisfied with was to do with the spilled glass of water. I said to her that it had brought to mind the song My Cup Runneth Over With Love and she suggested it might symbolise having an over caring attitude towards others and ‘spilling’ my love indiscriminately. That certainly had validity but I felt there was more to it than that and it was only when I connected the dream with the meditation teacher – my ‘spiritual mother’ – that I was able to join the dots. The two rooms in the dream – the study with the computer and Internet connection and the dining room where I did all my reading – represented ‘my way.’ The connection with the meditation teacher also added another dimension to the water symbolism; because life as we know it cannot exist without water, at the archetypal (spiritual) level it symbolises the life force itself – another name for which is love. The way I understand the symbolism now is that I was unconsciously spilling my life force energy (love) by following a path that wasn’t suited to me. My way home to myself was very eclectic. I studied widely and was involved in various groups but the main practice aspect of it was through a combination of meditation, dreamwork, Jungian psychology and A Course in Miracles. All of these methods have as their common denominator the development of trusting one’s own inner guidance and this dream was clearly demonstrating that very principle.
At the end of the discussion with Jane I confessed that though I agreed with the sentiment expressed, i.e. the need to find the source of love within, I was at a loss as to how to do it. She suggested a dream alchemy visualisation exercise but I never followed through on it. I had by that stage developed my own way of working with dreams and this kind of prescriptive approach, as well intentioned as it was, felt too controlling and manipulative. As the dream unfolded organically over time, I realised that I was on the right path already with what I was doing and just needed to have patience, perseverance and faith. I often felt lost and lonely and still do at times but I realise now that is the price to pay for following one’s own destiny.
The choice by the dream author of Mary as my alter ego was very auspicious. We met through a study group of A Course in Miracles and became very good friends. As our friendship developed, we found many correspondences in our lives, including being born in the same year, growing up in the same town and moving to the same city at the same age and living in similar places as our lives progressed. We are also alike personality wise, with many common interests. The main difference in our lives is that she has children and I don’t. I can’t think of anyone I know who would be a better fit as a reflection of myself. I don’t think it’s coincidence that she shares the same name as the most well known Western icon of the Great Mother. She also shares another connection with Mother Mary – her birthday is the same as the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, the recognition of the purity of the mother of the Christ Child at her own conception. I don’t know what to make of that but this dream seems to keep unfolding.
by Gloria | Jun 21, 2016 | Dreams, Jungian Psychology, Mystories
I had this dream 12½ years ago. It impacted me strongly at the time and left a permanent memory trace because of its transformational nature. I was prompted to write about it by a blog post I saw with a similar theme of awakening consciousness and healing. The post, Dreamspeak: Ancestral Healing, is the story of Toko-pa Turner’s dream visit by her Holocaust survivor grandfather, in which he apologised to her for passing on the effects of the trauma that he was only able to cope with by keeping it to himself. My dream visitor was my maternal grandmother and though the circumstances differ, the theme of unprocessed grief resonating down through the generations and the longing for completion – which appears to be as desirous from the other side as this one – is similar.
The dream:
I am in my dining room and Grandma Sweet is sitting at the table. She is young, attractive and very happy, so unlike how I remember her. I tell her I realised some time back that my hands are just like hers and put my left hand against her right to demonstrate. I say I have a photo of her that shows it very clearly and go off to look for it.
I rummage around in the pile of family photos but can’t find it and wonder if I’ve thrown it away. When I find it I realise it is her wedding photo – a fact I had forgotten. Her husband is sitting on a chair and she is standing with her left hand resting on his shoulder. It clearly shows the distinctive line of the thumb and the long fingers.
I think to myself that Grandma might like to see what has been happening in the family since she died, so I put her photo aside and start sorting through the rest to make a selection. In the process, I misplace her photo and have trouble finding it again. When I do, I look at it and realise ‘Oh, Grandma doesn’t need to see these, she knows everything that’s gone on.’ It was quite a revelation.
As I emerged from the dream, I was overcome by a sense of deep compassion and love for her that took me completely by surprise. Our family had lived with Grandma until I was 11 and I remembered her as a bitter and miserable old woman, frequently bedridden, always complaining and smelling of citronella. According to her she had a bad heart but according to Mum the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her. I never liked her as a child and was further influenced by her antagonism towards my mother and the stories Mum told of her oppressive childhood. When I awoke, my perception of her was instantly and, as it transpired, permanently transformed.
I had the dream just a few days before my divorce was to be finalised, so that made some sense of losing the wedding photo but I had no clue as to why it would be Grandma as she had never remarried after her husband died, as I had. At this point she had been dead 42 years and was part of my distant past. Why was she showing up now? I also wondered about the significance of the hands – why had they been made such a big deal of?
I posted the dream to the forum I was on at the time hoping for some clarity from other viewpoints. One of the suggestions was that I might be ‘handling’ life like Grandma and that had a certain resonance because at that stage in my life I was feeling very fragile and barely holding myself together. The unexpected ending of my second marriage had derailed me just as life was beginning to settle down after all the upheaval of my first husband’s death. The fact that Grandma was so happy and youthful in the dream gave me hope that the future would be brighter and I concluded that the message of the dream was just that – you will be happy again.
Because the framework within which the forum operated considered that everyone and everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer, I missed entirely the fact that this was a spirit visit from Grandma. As such it had a healing power that went way beyond the scope of psychological insight because it came from the deeper part of the psyche that Jung called the collective unconscious – a sphere of reality beyond that of the personal unconscious. In addition to reflecting my personal attitudes and beliefs, Grandma’s appearance in my dream was showing me a greater perspective – a viewpoint from beyond the physical time-space world. Although I lacked the knowledge and understanding of the Jungian approach to dreamwork at the time, the numinous quality of the dream ensured that it would continue to gestate in the depths until its wisdom and meaning came to fruition.
As a result of the dream I decided to research the family history and was shocked to learn that Grandma’s husband had died of cerebral syphilis. The story we had grown up with was that he had sustained a head injury in a fall from a cart and never recovered. Grandma was only 37 and was left with 5 children, the oldest being 13 and the youngest only 18mths old. I also learned that she had lost 4 children in infancy, including one who had been born more than a year after her husband’s death, with no father’s name cited. Poor Grandma! I could only imagine what shame and grief she had to bear, on top of trying to survive with no means of support. By the time I came on the scene in 1950 she was 60 years old and no doubt had been well and truly worn down by life.
I framed the photo that had been in my dream and kept it on my bedroom dresser where it served to remind me of the strength and resilience I had inherited through the motherline. Grandma Sweet may have lost her sweetness through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but her survivor spirit was an inspiration to me. When I moved house several years later I packed the photo away. It was a fitting gesture to moving on, as it had been her death that had resulted in my mother moving with her daughters away from the mining town that had been our home with its stifling atmosphere, oppressive conditions and lack of opportunities for women.
It was only recently that I got a new perspective on the significance of the hands in the dream. The Toko-Pa Turner blog post referenced at the beginning of this story appeared on the Depth Psychology Alliance Facebook page I follow and I posted a comment: I had a dream of my grandmother once. She said nothing but I was shown a photograph of her in which I recognised my hands were the same as hers. A lifetime of antagonism towards her melted away. I love what Amy Beth Katz said about our ancestors returning in our dreams. That is definitely my experience.
Amy responded with: You have healing hands, Gloria, don’t you?
My immediate reaction was ‘No way!!!’ but the intensity of my denial surprised me and so I began to wonder ‘why so adamant?’ I had worked as a massage therapist many years ago and had also done Reiki but neither were really my thing, so that didn’t fit. Then I thought about the fact that through all the dark times, starting with my late husband’s cancer diagnosis 20 years ago, writing was what kept me sane and helped me work everything through. I did dialogues with dream characters and other figures from the imaginal realm, cathartic rants that I ritually burnt, worked and re-worked a book (still a work in progress), wrote about my experiences with hypnotherapy, wrote up my dreams and explored them through writing, participated on the dream forum and journalled religiously. Writing has, without question been the most healing thing I’ve done with my hands but it was mostly self-healing.
Then I thought about this blog – from the very start my intention in writing about my dreams has had healing as the focus, as that has been a constant thread in the dreams. I initially decided to blog my stories because I’ve always loved reading other people’s stories and been helped a great deal by them but I have been stalemated for over a year because of that insidious voice of self-doubt: It’s too hard. It’s too personal. You’re not a writer. What’s the point? Who cares? Who wants to read it anyway? People will think you’re nuts (I thought so myself at one point!). Why don’t you just go and enjoy yourself? And the most crippling of all, ‘Just who do you think you are?’
As I pondered this, I remembered a story my sisters and I had grown up with. Mum had won a writing competition at school and received a prize. When she proudly showed it to her mother – Grandma Sweet – Grandma became very angry and told her not to waste her time on nonsense like that. And so she didn’t, instead following in the path of domesticity that was laid out for her as a woman of that time and place and social status. She ended up like her mother, a ‘deserted wife’ with 5 young kids to raise. My impression of Grandma was that she was a mother and homemaker by nature and that her great misfortune was in the tragedy of her husband’s early death. Not so my mother; having to conform to the domestic life was a disaster for someone with her free spirit and resulted in a lifetime of nervous breakdowns with the inevitable trauma to her daughters as we were split up and bounced around among relatives and neighbours.
When I think about this dream now I picture the gesture of putting my hand against Grandma’s as a ‘high five.’ It wasn’t really like that in the dream and yet the image is very compelling. I do feel her dream visit was a blessing. I am sure she would approve of what I’m doing and I know my mother absolutely would. My mother and grandmother couldn’t tell their stories and suffered accordingly but I can and am grateful for the opportunity to be able to do so and intend to make the most of it.
by Gloria | Mar 30, 2015 | Dreams
All your past, except its beauty, is gone and nothing remains but a blessing.
~A Course in Miracles
Healing is a wonderful Australian film based on a real life program in which prisoners in a minimum-security facility assist in the rehabilitation of injured raptors. The film is set at the time of the inception of the program, which coincides with the arrival of the main character, Viktor Khadem, at the prison farm. He is recruited for the construction of the facilities to house the birds and is thus involved in the program from the ground up, metaphorically creating a template for the fresh start he is preparing for in his own life. The theme of the injured birds being rehabilitated for release back into their natural environment is reflected in the lives of the inmates preparing for integration back into regular society. The contrast and similarities between those involved in the program and the injured birds is explored with sensitivity and empathy.
Wedge-tailed Eagle
The avian star of the movie is a magnificent Wedge-tailed Eagle named Yasmine and the close up opening scenes of her soaring through the air are breathtaking. Most of us only get to see these giants of the skies up close in captivity, or on road trips. The sight of Wedgies feeding on road kill is familiar to anyone who has spent time traversing the endless stretches of roadways that criss-cross this vast continent. The elegance they exhibit when fully airborne is in stark contrast to their clumsiness as they beat a hasty retreat from their meal and lift their massive bulk into the air when a vehicle approaches at high speed.
Part of the appeal of the film for me was that it resurrected the memory of a powerful healing dream I’d had 6 years after my husband’s death and after seeing the movie I felt inspired to share it.
This is the dream:
I’m walking alongside a road when I see some feathers on the ground. I look at them, wondering if they are from an eagle. I spot one that I know is an eagle’s feather. I show it to a man who appears nearby and as I do, it transforms into a giant feather that reaches right across the road and touches a pine tree on the opposite side.
At that moment a car comes along and I lift the feather like a boom gate to allow it to go by. Inside the car are three young men, all laughing as if enjoying a joke together. They look familiar but the car whizzes by too quickly for me to identify them. Just as they pass, the end of the feather breaks where I am holding it and I see that inside the shaft is a spiral structure, which I assume gives strength to the shaft.
I am awestruck trying to imagine the size of the bird that this feather must have come from. In my mind’s eye I see it flying over, slowly and silently observing all below.
I was quite perplexed by this dream as I couldn’t identify any of the characters and yet I felt I knew them. The man who materialized at the roadside with me I recognized as the same one who had been on the bus with me in my original vision and who showed up in just this same way in many dreams. Over time I came to regard him as a kind of companion/guide. He didn’t speak but it was as though the act of showing him the feather caused it to grow. I felt that it was a significant dream but didn’t know where to start, so posted it to the dream forum I was on at the time with the comment that I thought feathers might indicate a message from the spirit realm but didn’t know what the message was.
Later, I resumed the book I had been reading the night before I had the dream, Hello From Heaven, which was about after death communications – ADCs. There were some stories of unusual encounters with birds that bereaved persons felt were messengers from their deceased loved ones and as I was reading, my mind drifted onto the dream. Soon I was absorbed in a treasured memory of an encounter with a trio of Wedge-tailed Eagles, presumably a pair of adults and a juvenile, that my late husband and I had been privileged to share. The 16 acre property we lived on had panoramic views of the surrounding countryside and I had just come from the house when I spotted them spiralling slowly upwards out of a valley, one above the other, on a thermal. I called Roger over and we stood together watching them.
Initially we could see them clearly with our naked eyes but as they rose higher and higher they became harder to see, so I went to get the binoculars. We stood together silently, passing the binoculars back and forth and as we watched, the first one left the thermal and glided off in a straight line. It then began circling widely until the second one joined it and finally, when the third one reached them, they headed due east at a constant altitude. By this time they were barely visible even with the binoculars and we soon lost sight of them. With the spell broken, we went back to what we had been doing.
As that memory faded, another incident came to mind that occurred on this same property. We had a large shed we wanted to use to collect rainwater from but the three huge pine trees adjacent to it were constantly dropping pine needles into the gutters. They also posed a fire hazard to the shed and so on that basis and taking into account that they weren’t native to the area, we reluctantly decided to cut them down.
There is a bit of skill involved in tree felling but we had removed a few smaller pines by this time, so didn’t anticipate any problems. The first two fell without incident but the third one refused to topple. Eventually Roger decided to get the tractor out and pull it over using a very long rope and while he was organizing it, I went and got my camera. This was a pre-digital SLR with a mechanical lever to advance the film and as the tractor started to inch forward, I put my eye to the viewfinder to take a shot of the scene while the tree was still standing. It started to lean ever so slowly but took so long to fall that I was able to wind the film on and get another shot with it mid way before it finally crashed to the ground.
I took more shots of the whole scene. There was now light and space where previously there had been a great wall of dark green and the three majestic trees lay in a row amidst shattered branches and hundreds of scattered pinecones. By this time the noise from the chain saw and tractor and the sound of crashing trees had faded into silence and as I lowered the camera and surveyed the scene, tears began to roll down my face. Roger came over and said, “Did that make you feel sad?” I nodded my head and he said, “It did me too.”
Now a whole cascade of memories began crowding my mind, triggering an upwelling of grief but just as it threatened to overwhelm me, I heard a voice inside my head say, “Don’t pine for me!” I knew instantly that this was the message of the dream and it was coming from Roger. In a flash I also knew who the figures in the car were: Roger was in the driver’s seat and with him in the front was my sister’s husband, Kim, who had died two years before him. Kim and Roger had worked together in their teens and Kim had introduced Roger and I. In the back of the dream car was my cousin, Ray, who had died the year before Kim. Three young men, all in their forties, dead within three years of each other but if the dream was anything to go by they were having a ball and right in that moment I envied them. It had been a very difficult 6 years since Roger’s passing and at the time I had the dream I was at my lowest point. I felt more like the felled trees than the soaring eagles.
I was a bit mystified by the message at first because although I knew I wasn’t fully over my grief, I wouldn’t have described it as pining. Then I remembered a quite dramatic incident from the night before I had the dream. In the book Hello From Heaven that I had been reading, there was a story of a young man who had been killed in a helicopter crash appearing to his mother, telling her he was happy and imploring her to let go of him. As I read the story, I began to wonder if there had been any resolution to the visitation I’d had from Roger 4 years earlier in which he had asked me to speak to his mother because she wasn’t letting go of him. I began mentally talking to him, asking if everything was O.K. now and if not to let me know if I could do anything to help.
As if on cue, there was a loud bang from the adjacent room. The cat that had been asleep on the bed in the room came flying out with her fur standing on end and I leaped up from my chair sending the cat on my lap flying for cover. I went into the room to investigate but couldn’t see anything amiss. It had sounded similar to a bird hitting the windowpane but besides being unlikely because it was nighttime, the shutters were down, so it didn’t make sense.
Needless to say I felt more than a little disturbed by this. Was Roger saying he is not at peace? The subject of his prior visitation had been dropped from any conversation with my mother in law soon after it happened and she had since moved interstate. I no longer had much contact with her and besides, spirit visits were a subject I was somewhat wary about myself at the time, so didn’t feel inclined to broach the subject with her again. I did the only thing I could think of and said a prayer for her to find peace and closure. That night I had the dream.
As I reviewed the whole unfolding saga from the pre-dream incident and the dream itself, to the memories it evoked and the message I received, it became clear that ‘don’t pine for me’ was more like ‘stop worrying about me.’ The visitation I’d had previously from Roger was unmistakably real and had convinced me once and for all of the survival of consciousness but because it was a plea for help with no satisfactory resolution rather than a message of reassurance, it had raised more questions than it answered. My search for understanding is what had led me to reading Hello From Heaven .
Although the dream helped me let go of the concern and sense of responsibility I had been feeling on Roger’s behalf, I was still left wondering about how unfinished business for those who have passed on is dealt with. This had never been a concern when I believed that death was the end of the story. Eventually, I would make an in-depth study of a wide range of beliefs and viewpoints concerning what is generally referred to as the afterlife but in the meantime, I decided my main priority was to sort myself out. Regardless of what I learned about what happened after death, I didn’t want to be dealing with unfinished business on my deathbed or taking it with me if I was going somewhere else, nor did I want to leave any mess behind for anyone else to deal with if I could help it. I had an intuitive sense that it was best to deal with the problems I had while I was alive and I still hold that viewpoint.
One aspect of the dream I could never come to any definite conclusion about is whether or not I was seeing the spirits of the three males who’d died or whether they were regular dream figures. Was it a case of my dreaming mind giving me an image that would put my mind at rest? A psychoanalytic approach would certainly see it that way but it didn’t feel right to me at the time and still doesn’t and in the final analysis that is what counts. Dream interpretation is an art, not an exact science. One thing I can say is that the dream didn’t lend itself to the usual kind of psychological analysis of the characters. Even after I realized who the occupants of the car were, I couldn’t make that approach fit. I’ve had countless dreams of Roger over time but this one stands out in my mind as having a very different feel to it.
The presence of my ‘guide’ was an important clue that this was no ordinary dream but there were also the feathers, the pine tree and the spiral inside the feather. Feathers and birds are universal symbols of the connection between heaven and earth, as are trees with their roots in the ground and crowns in the air. Conifers have a special significance because they are evergreen and so are symbols of eternal life. The spiral, which was in the dream itself and repeated in the associated memories of the spiraling eagles and the patterning of the pine cones, is a universal pattern and also symbolic of the link between heaven and earth, as it is ubiquitous throughout nature and the cosmos.
As for what made the loud noise, I never did find out but it certainly got my attention and having had more of this type of incident than I can possibly count by now, I know better than to put it down to ‘just a coincidence.’
by Gloria | Dec 16, 2014 | A Course in Miracles, Dreams
“The world is not left by death but by Truth” is a quote in A Course in Miracles that I came across in 1999, in the wake of a fairly dramatic visit from my deceased husband in which he had asked me to speak to his mother because she wasn’t letting go of him. The visit and its aftermath convinced me of two things: that his consciousness had survived and so had the attachment bond to his mother. Both of these scenarios had caused some consternation when they collided with my previously held worldview that life ended with the death of the body but it was a troubling incident at the time of his diagnosis that caused the ‘Truth’ quote to resonate most strongly within me.
Back in 1996 when Roger first told me he had terminal cancer, I asked him how he felt about it and without hesitation he replied, “It will solve a lot of problems.” His statement reflected the attitude I had long held for myself – that death was a way out when life got too hard – but it was a shock to hear him voice the same attitude. I had always regarded him as the strong one and capable of surmounting any difficulties. He had recently begun to see a psychologist however, so obviously all was not well.
He’d had a couple of major depressive episodes over the years we had been together and had appeared to pull through them but like a lot of men, he was reluctant to talk about emotional problems and I was not privy to what was really troubling him. From the scraps of information he shared and the gradual unfolding of events, it transpired that it was his estrangement from his mother three years earlier that was causing him the most grief, at least on the surface.
The final falling out had had a long incubation period, as these things do, stretching way back into childhood and involving a complex web of family relationships that are almost impossible to tease apart in any way that is ultimately satisfactory. In the final analysis love and forgiveness are the only way through the pain but we don’t give up our defences without a fight when we perceive them as protecting us. With his cancer diagnosis he stopped seeing the psychologist but he did reconnect with his mother. Though there wasn’t much change in the situation overall, at least they were able to spend some quality time together and I was very grateful to have her help to share the care that he needed.
One day I was lamenting the situation with a friend and he offered the opinion that some folks just know they’re not going to make it in this lifetime, so they check out. He then shared his views on reincarnation and his belief that our relationships are neither accidental nor confined to a single physical lifetime. After listening politely I replied that I didn’t believe in that sort of thing and that as far as I was concerned, we are all accidents of chemistry; we are born, we live, we die, end of story. He didn’t push it any further but what he said had struck a chord with me because of my own ever-present ambivalence about life.
At some level what he said made sense and it planted the seed of the idea that our complex relationships are embedded in some sort of continuum of existence. I eventually did my own deep investigation into the concept of reincarnation because of unusual experiences of my own and though I don’t think the birth-death cycle can be viewed as a linear process as the conventional model of reincarnation portrays it, I have no doubt that the non-physical realm interpenetrates the physical plane in ways that can’t be comprehended with our rational minds.
There is a poem by Goethe, The Holy Longing and it’s poignant final lines come as close as anything to explaining to me the reason Roger ‘checked out’ so seemingly prematurely and my own attachment to an escape clause:
And so long as you haven’t experienced this:
to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
It is only in following the path that was opened up to me through Roger’s illness and death and the many life changes that followed it, that I have come to understand the meaning of those words for myself. Life is not just about survival and achieving our ego goals but has real purpose and meaning. What has to die are all the false beliefs about who we are, who others are and why we are here; the conditioning we take on in order to be accepted within our family, society, and culture and to make our way in the world. It’s not easy deconstructing patterns and programs when they have become solidified into an identity through repetition. The catalyst for change is usually suffering and it often becomes so intense as to be physically and/or psychologically overwhelming.
When Roger died my world was completely turned upside down. I was only 18 when we met, we had worked together from early on in our marriage, had no children to distract us from each other and did pretty much everything together. In many ways, his family was a better fit for me than my own and so my identity became lost in his. His, in turn, had been lost in his parents’ and I believe it was this struggle to individuate, as Jung called the process, that became too much for him. His death from cancer at 48 was a shock that took years for me to assimilate and it has only been through confronting the identity crisis that it precipitated in me that has enabled me to see his struggles in a different light. This identity crisis is ultimately a spiritual crisis and though Roger was not able to embrace the option of a spiritual path for himself while he was alive, I have no doubt that he was guiding my life in that direction from the other side when he passed over. My dream life opened up almost the instant he died and apart from the healing it facilitated, I received a lot of what I can only call spiritual direction through the dreams.
One particularly powerful bit of guidance came in the form of a type of dream I eventually learned was called a disembodied voice dream, where you wake up hearing a voice speaking but with no memory of a dream. It came at a time when I was trying to find some direction in my life; I had begun a counselling course as a possible future vocation and was also participating in various women’s groups. Somewhere along the line I picked up the practice of doing affirmations and one day I decided to use a forty minute bus ride to do repetitions of the affirmations I had been learning. They were mostly of the self-esteem and confidence boosting kind and I just kept repeating them over and over, concentrating intently so as not to let my mind wander. During the night I awakened from sleep hearing a voice say:
It’s not about self-esteem, the real questions are “where have you come from, what are you doing here and where are you going?”
My well-considered and highly intelligent response was “Huh?”
Next day I happened to see a friend who I knew was involved with Eastern spirituality, so I asked him if he knew what it meant and he said “You come from God and you’re going back to God.” I don’t recall what he said regarding the middle part but the idea about God was not welcome news. At that time the word had connotations of a fickle authoritarian figure who demanded allegiance in the form of suffering and blood sacrifices. Since then my God-image has undergone a considerable transformation and I am happy now to substitute attributes like love, joy and peace for the word God.
I have contemplated these dream questions much in the fifteen years since they came to me and have struggled to make sense of the countless experiences that convinced me that life is indeed continuous. I have come to the conclusion that what I am doing here is learning how to live fully into those God-like qualities that feel so elusive in the everyday struggles of a mortal life. It’s not so much about doing as being and especially being as fully in the here and now as possible and in one sense that makes the question of origination and destination superfluous.
When A Course in Miracles says the world is not left by death but by truth, it is referring to the world we believe is real – the physical world of bodies and dense matter and time and space that we inevitably identify with as we journey through this human life. It is not left by death because what we call death is not the end of life but just the point in time when the soul leaves the body. This is the truth that sets us free. Life is not circumscribed by the events we call birth and death and our little lives here are an integral part of the whole of existence. Coming to a realisation of that for myself has made all the difference in how I view life with all its dramas and has enabled me to accept my own problems and use them for growth and healing rather than constantly trying to escape from them.
Without the spiritual life that was awakened in me through my husband’s death I would not be here today. I am only now beginning to fully appreciate the gifts and blessings that flowed to me from that event because I’ve had to do a lot of healing of my own and went through a very long dark period where I felt like a bottomless well of grief and could see little point in being here. It is only in retrospect that I can see that I have been guided all along.
In 2006 I participated in an Adult Enquirers group attached to the church that I eventually became baptised in and we were invited to write a reflection to end each evening. As I was wondering what on earth I could write, not being given to that sort of thing, a poem began to form that almost wrote itself. I just had to tweak it a bit here and there to make it flow. Many people at the group said they could identify with it and as it pretty well sums up everything I’ve said here, I thought it would be worth sharing. I called it Surrender and it is essentially the story of a soul lost and found. At the time I wrote it, the idea of surrender was pretty scary and it still is in a way but I’m learning to trust that there is a greater wisdom than my little ego that’s really been in charge all along anyway.
Surrender
I knew You once in all Your glory
When I was unafraid
And had no guilt to block Your light
No tears, remorse or shame
I basked in You, I had no story
To shield me from Your Love
And Your forgiveness and delight
Shone unimpeded from above
Bit by bit, my soul withdrew
I know not how, or why
I slowly turned my back on You
And thought ‘twas You who’d died
For many years my heart stayed closed
But You did not give up
When grief cracked open my resolve
The darkness glimpsed Your love
Once again, I turned to run
But now I could not hide
Your love, Your light were far too bright
At last, my will succumbed
by Gloria | Aug 29, 2014 | Dreams
I have been sitting on an article I began writing several months ago titled The World is Not Left by Death but by Truth. This is a line from A Course in Miracles which had a strong impact on me when I first encountered it, but each time I tried to tackle the subject, I would soon become dissatisfied with what I’d written, delete all except a few salvageable fragments and put it back once again in the too hard basket. That I had a lot of resistance to expressing my thoughts on the subject was obvious but I rationalised that nothing and nobody is compelling me to do it but myself. This is true and yet for some reason I still felt driven to collect and express my thoughts on the matter and it was blocking me from writing anything else, as none of the other dream stories would flow either.
When I read the reports of Robin Williams’ suicide, I was spurred once again into action and recognised it as a recurring pattern. Each time I would get motivated to write, it was in response to hearing about yet another suicide, either ‘accidental’ or intentional, a media report, or a personal story. The intensity of my reaction to his suicide surprised me, as it is a subject I have investigated thoroughly and contemplated deeply over many years and thought I had laid to rest. So, I thought I would get what Robin Williams’ death has stirred up off my chest before going on to what I originally planned.
Not having followed his off-screen life, I didn’t know about his history of depression and substance abuse, so that partly accounted for being surprised at the news but there was more to my reaction than that. As the stories of his life and the details of his struggles emerged, the conflicting emotions I was feeling increased and finally I had to admit to myself that it was touching a few still raw nerves. I know too well that we don’t react emotionally to anything unless it has some personal resonance within ourselves, so obviously there was something to explore.
Although I wouldn’t count myself a fan of Robin Williams, I had enjoyed several of his movies and respected both his acting ability and the calibre of the roles he played in the ones I had seen. Coincidentally, I had recently hired his movie What Dreams May Come because I wanted to have a fresh look at it from the broader perspective I have these days about the whole subject of life and death. I had initially seen it soon after my husband’s death 17 years ago, a time when I was going through a deep grieving process. My belief that life ends in peaceful oblivion was being challenged at the time by too many inexplicable happenings for me to dismiss them lightly and seeing this movie was part of the process of seeking answers.
It’s a visually striking movie and explores the effects of tragic loss on the lives of those left behind. Robin Williams plays a doctor who has everything he wants in life; a successful and fulfilling career, happily married to his soul mate, with two great kids, but tragedy strikes when the children are killed in a car accident. The story follows the couple as they struggle to come to terms with the loss, but just as they are beginning to recover he is killed, also in a car accident.
After his death, he is surprised to find he is still alive, albeit in a subtle body, and when his attempts to get through to his wife fail, he eventually moves on, ultimately finding himself in a heavenly realm, reunited with those who have gone before him. Meanwhile, on the physical plane, his wife spirals once again into depression and eventually kills herself. Contrary to his hope and expectations, she does not join him where he is; her destination is a realm that reflects her mode of death and mental state at the time. When he learns where she is, he sets out to try and reconnect with her, ultimately defying the odds to save her from her fate.
The movie explores the profound effects of grief and the hopelessness it can engender but ultimately affirms the redemptive power of love to heal and transcend all obstacles. It mixes conventional and unconventional beliefs about the afterlife and contrasts the consequences of death by suicide with non-volitional deaths. In doing so, it makes a commentary on what role the state of mind at the point of death has on the destination of the person, and makes for a poignant reflection on Robin Williams’ own death.
As an adjunct to watching the movie again, I reviewed the speech in Hamlet, from where it got its title. The whole speech is an eloquent and insightful account of the conflicted mind of someone contemplating suicide as a way out of a painful dilemma. Initially, Hamlet regards life and death as mutually exclusive states, comparing death to the deep sleep state; the state of oblivion, where we are effectively ‘dead to the world.’ In this viewpoint, the dilemma is purely a moral one:
To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?
But then doubt creeps into his mind: ‘What if death is more like the dream state, than deep sleep?’ Our experience of a dream feels every bit as real as waking life reality when we are immersed in it, and nightmares have an intensity that can be hard to shake.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause…
Further along in the speech, he expresses his fear that those dreams may be worse than what he is facing in life:
But that the dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of?
This ‘fate worse than death’ is what was depicted in the movie and had me cringing inwardly at the reinforcement of old stereotypes. To my mind, there are enough rational reasons for discouraging suicide and seeking alternative answers without using outmoded fear-based models of hellish afterlife consequences as a deterrent.
When I was 20 my father committed suicide. He had been an alcoholic and deserted the family about 16 years earlier. He chose to end his life when his whereabouts became known. When I heard the news, all the anger I’d held towards him for his abandonment and the ensuing hardship for the family, melted away. He had apparently left a note to say he couldn’t live with himself any longer. He had never overcome his alcoholism, and though on some level his death could be seen as taking the easy way out, it was obvious that he must have been suffering deeply. His death was the final factor in my rejection of the religion which at one time had sustained me but which I had become increasingly dissatisfied with. As much of a mess as my father had made of his life, I couldn’t agree with a belief system that consigned suicides to hell.
The threat of afterlife consequences no longer had such a grip on me, but the idea of suicide as a way out gradually began to take hold and it would be many years for it to be uprooted completely. On several occasions during my adult life when I had thought seriously about killing myself, I sought therapeutic help instead. I didn’t seriously want to die at those times, I was just having a hard time coping for various reasons. When I was nearly 50, the visitation experience of my late husband, which came about a year after I originally saw What Dreams May Come, compelled me to accept that there was a continuity of life. It was a game changer, but the biggest incentive to weathering the storms was my moral conviction that it wasn’t the answer, not just for myself, but for the effect on others. After the break up of my second marriage, I hit a low point that made my previous lows look like a picnic, and was seriously considering putting an end to my misery. No fear-based beliefs or moral considerations were enough to calm my besieged psyche.
It was a dream that once and for all put my mind to rest. This dream was almost an exact replay of the meditation vision I had of my mother which I described in a previous post. As in the vision, I saw only an image of my mother’s face, but this time instead of looking sad, she was smiling and at the same time had a look of real tenderness and deep compassion on her face. She communicated telepathically, as in the vision: ‘It’s alright if you want to be here now, Gloria.’ When I woke from the dream, my first thought was that she was giving me permission to join her but when I mulled it over in the morning, I realized she was saying that it was entirely my decision whether to go on or put an end to it and that there would be no judgment and no repercussions.
This was a very powerful message that enabled me to let go of any beliefs I had taken on board and also relieved me of the persistent guilt I had always suffered from whenever I entertained the idea of suicide. Most importantly though, it had the effect of throwing me back entirely on myself. Yet, as I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, it felt like something other than my own little will to live that kept me going. Over time, the feeling that I am part of something much greater than my insignificant little ego increased, as did my understanding that doing my inner healing makes a positive contribution to the evolution of the collective consciousness. That is what now gives my life the meaning that makes me feel it is worth living.
Although I haven’t come up with any definitive understanding of the nature of spirit communication, and not for want of trying, my own experiences and the vast amount of data now documented on psychic activity prove beyond reasonable doubt that it is a genuine phenomenon. The only thing that makes sense to me is that consciousness is not confined to the body, that our physical reality is embedded in a field of consciousness and is constantly interacting with it, whether we are aware of it or not. This requires a shift in perception from viewing consciousness as being a product of the brain; the scientific materialist viewpoint, to seeing matter as the product of consciousness and integral with it; the spiritual point of view. If consciousness is primary, which I’m convinced it is, then death as we think of it is no different than birth – we emerge out of cosmic consciousness and merge back into it.
Perhaps learning to consciously engage with this field of consciousness is the key to no longer being afraid of the great unknown that death is but that would then also mean giving up any comforting ideas about it being the saviour of problems we have in this life. One of my guiding lights has been Jung’s brilliant insights into the nature of the unconscious, both personal and transpersonal, and its innate tendency toward self-healing and wholeness. Something in us, that is also beyond us, wants us to grow into the best we can be, but we have to participate in our healing and that means dealing with the dreams, good and bad, waking and sleeping, in our current life.
Sadly, Robin Williams got to the point where he saw no alternative but to end his life, and it is very painful for his family to have to live with the memory of him doing it in such a gruesome manner and in a mental state of intense suffering. Since his death, I have seen and read much about him and it is obvious he was struggling with a lot of inner conflict. He decided it was the best way out. To judge his actions is pointless. No one can know what it is like to live inside another’s mind and body, but hopefully much good will come of it.
by Gloria | Mar 3, 2014 | A Course in Miracles, Dreams, Jungian Psychology, Mystories
Most people who develop a long term relationship with this remarkable work have a story to tell not only about their first encounter with it but also about the conflicts that quickly develop once the initial infatuation wears off. If that sounds like a regular relationship, it’s no accident, for the book was written by a most unusual process which involved a psychology professor taking down dictation from a voice she heard internally, which she perceived as none other than Jesus. Anyone who is drawn to it then, is also inevitably drawn into a challenging relationship with this enigmatic figure of history regardless of their religious background, or lack thereof. Because the Jesus of the Course is a radically different figure from the one of conventional Christianity and the popular cultural image, it is a huge challenge to both the intellect and the emotions.
The book is essentially a spiritual path combining meditation practice with psychological techniques, the primary aim of which is to guide practitioners of it to a state of inner peace and thereby into an enhanced attunement with one’s own inner guidance. It employs an ingenious and methodical approach consisting of a theoretical foundation and daily exercises for practicing what it teaches. After 15 years of working with it, there is no doubt in my mind that it is from an inspired and wholly benevolent source. What that source is exactly is beyond my comprehension but my initial encounter with it led to a conversation with an inner voice myself and though brief, it was very compelling and had a deep impact on me. I have also come to believe that the vision I had 2½ years prior to learning about the Course foreshadowed my connection with it.
I first learned of it when a friend gave me a book to read called A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson but I have to say I was put off by her evangelical style and wasn’t tempted to look into it any further. I would occasionally come across quotes from the Course in other reading however and the different contexts in which it was mentioned would pique my interest but again I didn’t feel moved to look any further into it.
Then one night at a Jung Society meeting, which I had been attending for a bit over a year at the time, I bumped into a woman who had once worked at the vet’s where I took my cats. I was very surprised to see her there but she had come because she was interested in the evening’s talk, which happened to be on dreams. In the course of catching up with each other’s news, she told me she was about to start a group studying A Course in Miracles, so I said I would be interested in doing it. The meeting got going before I found out the details, so I planned to catch up afterwards. The talk went on and on and as with many of the Jung talks for me at that time, most of it went right over my head. I hung in only to see my friend afterwards but when it finally finished, she was nowhere to be found. Apparently it had gone over her head too. We had no way of contacting each other, so I assumed that was the end of the matter.
Four days later, amazingly, I bumped into her at my local shopping centre and she told me the group was off, at least temporarily, because the venue had fallen through. I offered to have it in my rumpus room and so we started on June 15th, 1999. My friend ended up not taking the group herself after all but handed it on to a friend of hers who I didn’t know and who was relatively new to it herself. As I knew nothing about it at all, this didn’t seem to be too much of a problem but as I soon found out, it was a case of the blind leading the blind and after 4 months I was ready to throw in the towel. In an attempt to revitalise my fast waning interest, I decided to find out a bit more about it and got onto the biography of how it came into being, Journey Without Distance.
The book described how those involved with it prayed for guidance about the publishing process. There were 4 people involved at this point and they would base their decisions on the information they received. I wondered to myself if that would work for me, so, remembering the vision, I said, in my mind, “O.K. Jesus, you said ‘ask and you will receive’ so I’ve got some questions for you” and proceeded to ask questions. Instantly a voice, which was definitely not my own thoughts, began answering and soon the answers were coming before I had finished asking the question. Then it began giving me information without me even formulating a question. At one point I managed to get in ‘why the short sharp answers?’ and it shot straight back ‘it saves time.’ It also told me that I need to trust the process. Because of the rapidity of the dialogue and the surprise factor, I have no idea what my initial questions were but did manage to record the last part. I had an appointment with my hypnotherapist next day, so I asked, ‘What do I need to work on?’ The voice in my head answered me:
‘Fear.’
‘Fear of what?’
‘Fear of abandonment.’
‘I’ve already worked on that.’
‘You haven’t worked on your fear of abandonment by God.’
‘What! I couldn’t go to Pat and say that. I would be too embarrassed.’
‘There’s no need to be. She will understand. I have sent you to Pat.’
The last statement left me dumbfounded but I gathered my thoughts enough to grab a pen and wrote down what I could remember. I had to admit that I did indeed find Pat through what seemed to be a series of orchestrated steps. This kind of thing had happened often through my life, as it undoubtedly does for everyone, so wasn’t particularly noteworthy but to be told by a voice in my head that he was behind it, was a bit unnerving. What is remarkable in this conversation is that there was no comment whatsoever on what I now see as an incredibly naïve and arrogant statement that I had worked on my fear of abandonment. When my short lived second marriage ended 3 years later, I would get to confront this issue in all its profound complexity and it wasn’t pretty.
The following day at my hypnosis session, I told Pat about the conversation and to my relief she was quite unfazed. She suggested we try a musical journey to see what came of it but I got absolutely nowhere and it was the most unproductive session I had ever had. Jesus showed up and tried to communicate something to me but I just couldn’t get it. At that point in my life I was still struggling with the whole notion of God, conflated as it was with the conditioning of the past and my own rebellion against religious ideas. My inner conflict created much resistance but fortunately the Son had never suffered the same hostile reaction as I had towards the Father. As much as I harboured serious doubts about the validity of many of the stories, I was never quite able to shed the deep affection I’d had for Jesus as a child and for that I am grateful. I suspect now that children are able to intuit the truth within the cultural overlays.
The whole experience did serve to keep me persevering with the Course but only for another 4 months. My life was undergoing a lot of changes and since the group had started, the group leader had moved into a house close by, so the group continued at her home. The book sat on my shelf for the next 5 years and every now and again I would dip into it. Gradually, as I did wider reading and life’s continuing dramas had primed me sufficiently, it began making sense to me. I picked it up one day, began reading the text and decided to start the workbook from scratch again. It has been an everyday part of my life since and I have no doubt that it is a ’til death do us part’ relationship. The beauty of both the language and its message and the challenge of its thought system, has a depth that is ever unfolding and quite simply, I love it.
My experience of a voice that sounded very much like the kind of experience Helen Schucman, the scribe of the Course had, gave me greater confidence in and appreciation for what I was reading, although it would be several years before I began to fully trust it. The conversation I had was just a few minutes long, so I can only imagine what it must have been like hearing this voice over 7 years and taking down the dictation, then going through the transcription process with her colleague Bill Thetford as he typed it up. All this while holding down very demanding professional positions and trying to keep the whole thing secret. Mama Mia!
When I came to type up the notes I had made, I put ‘Fear of abandonment of God’ instead of ‘by God,’ and then became confused about what I actually heard. I concluded at the time that it was probably both but in the intervening years I have learned from personal experience that we can neither be abandoned by God, or abandon God ourselves, because God is integral to all existence. This understanding is a far cry from my atheist days – ‘we are all accidents of chemistry, we live, we die, peaceful oblivion, end of story.’ I don’t mean to imply I know what God is because I don’t but I can say that when I was at my lowest point after the marriage break up, there was something other than my own little will to live keeping me going. This ‘something’ I am satisfied to call God. The Course offers the best definition I have come across: ‘We say God is… and then we cease to speak.’
One thing I learned from the confusion over what I heard was not to take anything I read as Gospel, no matter how trustworthy I believed it to be. There is no such thing as a pure channel. Even if the transmission is perfectly pure, it is still filtered through the receiver’s own mind and life experience and the transcription process, as in any translative endeavour, is not an exact science. As the Course itself puts it ‘…words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from Reality.’
I find it ironic now that I was introduced to A Course in Miracles at a Jung meeting where the topic was on dreams. Jungian psychology, dreams and ACIM would eventually come to make up what I would refer to as my Holy Trinity of Healing and they complement each other perfectly. The Course has much to say on dreams, as does Jungian psychology and my worldview has had a considerable shakeup since that night back in 1999. I don’t nod off in Jung meetings anymore for starters and I have long since let go of the kinds of conflict I used to experience in trying to get my head around this extraordinary work. In fact it’s not something that can be understood with the head at all but has to be experienced through the heart. A statement from the introduction sums this up:
The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.
These blocks are our psychological defence mechanisms and being based in protecting the identity we have built up since the year dot, they are not relinquished without a fight.
