My Dream about the Book of Mormon and a Wedding

On the night of September 25th, I accidentally fell asleep on the couch in my family's TV room. Though I spent an uncomfortable night on it, the upside about sleeping on this couch is that--for some reason--I always have vivid dreams there. That night I remember a single dream that hit me with a train of spiritual insight, and I want to share it here.

The dream

Here's the dream as I wrote it down immediately afterward. Note that the names have been taken out so as to not embarrass anyone I know who might read this post:

"In my parents' theater, my professor is there, and some peers from college say that they've returned my quadruple combination. I get mad at them, saying that my professor wanted to read the Book of Mormon, but that she couldn't because I didn't have it with me. I give it to her, and she says she's at 2 Nephi 16, and I ask her what she thinks of the first part of 2 Nephi, implicitly referencing the philosophical parts. She's about to talk about the part referencing the Lamanites becoming "as flint," but then she has to go teach a class. I read a passage in a blue James Hillman book where he quotes a non-member scholar about the Book of Mormon: "The Book of Mormon 'exploded' into the world, feeling through the world to where it could best fit, from outside of time." I look up the source for the quote, and he says that the Book of Mormon is like an appetizer (milk/toast) that so enthralls the eater that they don't pay attention to the rest of the meal, even if it's better. This is the atonement/testimony that gets you to stay. I'm so taken with this idea that I try to find my professor to tell her. No such luck. I go upstairs and I see a young woman from my singles ward in a wedding dress about to go onstage for a final performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, where the relatives of the cast can come to the audience if they couldn't at the beginning of the run. I contemplate telling this young woman that we met before this life, that we were together before this marriage, but she already knows this, and it's inappropriate for this situation."

It goes without saying that dreams like this strike the waking mind as odd. But from my perspective, dreams are only odd in this way because of a "translation error" that happens when you try to think of it in waking consciousness. After all, the tired mind isn't abstract and doesn't think in rigid categories--it's instead wholly concrete and associational. A broad principle like "loneliness" will be represented by a particular, concrete instance of that loneliness (like a crying child, for instance), and different instances of the same principle tend to blend and merge into each other.

Knowing this, I've read that it's best to "interpret" the dream while you're tired. That way, you approach that dream in the same state that made it, letting "like" go unto "like." So I'm very lucky that I was able to quickly pull up my iPad and record what the dream's remnants themselves told me about its meaning. I'll paraphrase what I wrote in the rest of this post since I think it's significant not only for me but for anyone who values the Book of Mormon and its spiritual "ground."

What the dream taught me

My dream was about linking together things that are still separate. If the Book of Mormon "exploded" into the world and flowed into its cracks and its crevices, this dream exploded into the subtle fissures in my life--its reality adapted itself to what I needed to hear. The young woman in the wedding dress is thus going to a wedding of times, circumstances, and people, which both the Book of Mormon and my dream are instances of. This is an example of the ajna principle, or that of the Third Eye Chakra, where everything acts as a face of everything else, where all separate things weave together.

This wedding is a way that a pre-perceptual, pre-conceptual unity of time and places can come into my awareness. It brings together the things that were already together pre-existently, letting the invisible togetherness become visible. The Book of Mormon is a major way that this reunion of people, times, and places can come into the visible world. It reveals the ties that already exist between them. The Book of Mormon--as a wedding--concretely actualizes the bonds that had already existed in potential from eternity.

The atonement as it's manifest in the Book of Mormon is then like an appetizer of milk and toast--like "milquetoast," it's unassertive, unassuming, and timid. In other words, the atonement as at-one-meant of separate things presents itself first, but in a way that doesn't demand my attention; it hides in plain sight, waiting to be seen. If you eat it, it captivates because it's primal. As an appetizer, it's what you knew first, primarily, before anything else.It's a priori.

We should be together without having to do anything. I shouldn't try to assert or force that togetherness, since it's already apparent from eternity--as the atonement, as the appetizer of milk and toast, as the Book of Mormon. I am together with them from before I came here. I shouldn't try to force that togetherness on others, since it's already there between us, and that togetherness itself brings about the wedding.

The young woman who got married in the dream had recently (that is, in "real life") talked about how she isn't married yet. This reminds me of the "woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when [she] wast refused" of Isaiah 54, whom I've often felt like. Not only haven't I been the most successful person in romantic encounters, but I feel like I've been "left at the altar" of all sorts of unions with the inhabitants of the world. I've often noted that I've felt separate" from the people and things in the world, almost as if I weren't just romantically single, but left out of all intimacy with the wonders of life itself. But if I'm to believe my dream, the wedding of all things with all things is coming. Maybe it's always here; maybe I just have to recognize it. Maybe I just need to learn not to "force" the issue, meaning that my wedding with the world will happen when I stop trying to make it happen. After all, the groom isn't supposed to see his bride on the wedding day, much less talk to her. I should thus let us (I and any person or thing I want to come together with) each find our way to the altar. This happens at any moment in which I give up the "chase" after union or satisfaction, and let the union come to me. The union comes to me in the very moment I stop seeking it, since it has existed pre-existently and will exist to eternity.

I wrote that the final performance of the play staged here--the "telos" or end-goal of eternity not just at the end of time, but in each moment--will be witnessed by the relatives of the actors there. We as mortal human beings are all actors on a stage, getting ready for the wedding. The wedding of all things with all things is coming, and we're bringing it together from all times and all places. The relatives are those people who have left the stage but are still watching to see how it turns out. These are the Dead--not just the literal dead, but all the people, feelings, thoughts, and ideas that have exited life's stage for the moment. They watch with an eager eye to see how things will turn out--they have a "stake" in the wedding. They too will be wedded to everything else here, since they too are together with them pre-existently.

In this consummation of being, the tangle of relationships that had existed invisibly from eternity becomes visible. In a sudden moment of belonging, I see myself as a part of a whole--continuous, an extension of everything else, loved by all things. I've had these moments before (like this one time on the bus), and though they are few and far between, it isn't just reserved for the "end of the world." The wedding, as the marriage of all things to all things, exists forever in potential and is ready to pop into our awareness as soon as we stop grasping after that union.

How to Get Personal Revelation from Books

So, I have a thing for books. I typically read four to eight books at a time, and the bookshelves in my room are so full that I regularly have to take less essential junk out to make room for new books. Here's a picture of my non-fiction shelf, if you're curious:

I've read so many of these books that I make it a goal to revisit the ones I've already finished. To that end, I'll thoroughly annotate books I read to make sure that I know where my eyes should "fall" when thumbing through them. But a year or two ago, I began noticing an odd pattern: the books I revisited and the insights I remembered from them seemed to be exactly what I needed in that time of my life. It wasn't by deliberate action that this happened, of course; my decision to pick up a book that would later prove helpful came just as a spur of the moment impulse, a thought like "wouldn't it be nice to read that again?"

But as time went on, I started to observe my thoughts and feelings leading up to choosing that helpful book. I discovered that helpful books "call out to me." Whether it's the color of the spine or feelings I associate with the book, my mind will "catch hold" on something it signifies to me and make it seem more interesting that it normally does. It's almost like the book is "glowing" with significance, whereas others just seem the way they are by default.

Experimenting with this process, I discovered something else: if I let my unconscious mind take over when thumbing through the book, I'll usually land on the page that helps me the most. Here my habit for annotating comes in especially useful: if I flip to the right page, the underlines, boxes, and notes in the margins point me to what's most significant in that general area.

Realizing the potential in this phenomenon, I decided to use it consciously. For the past few weeks, I've begun most days by going over to my bookshelves, seeing which books have started "calling to me," and bringing them over to my desk. There, I thumb through the books, glean what it is I'm supposed to learn from them, and write those ideas down in an electronic notebook. To give you an idea of what this process is like, here's a brief excerpt from that journal:

The Qur'an: The alternation of day and night is a lesson to learn from God for those who have eyes to see. Night invariably follows day, but day invariably follows night. Night and day--sadness and happiness, pain and pleasure, etc.--are always together. Reference Heidegger, Hillman and Angels on heaven and hell. / The Crucible of Doubt: This life's uncertainty and estrangement is actually a salvation, one from the eternal stasis of Eden. This life's absurdity is what I need to grow, but not only that--it is what manifests the joy. Reference the above Qur'an quote and the Magician chapter of the Red Book on magic. / Emerson: Nature embosoms us all--she nourishes us and gives a new day to us every time we fall. We are continuallly in her womb. Poetry and philosophy reveal the truth and beauty behind the world, which are really one and the same. Truth and beauty are two sides of the same. / What We Talk about When We Talk about God: God is bigger and better and more awe-inspiring than we can comprehend at any moment. We need steps to open our minds to it. This is the day and the night, alternating so that I can be freed by each night.

What was amazing about this particular use of my technique--and has been happening increasingly often--is that it all centered around a common theme, in this case how opposites and duality clearly manifest the whole. I came to the conclusion that some power is using these books to communicate certain ideas to me that I need to know. And I don't doubt for a minute that this power is God.

The point I'm trying to make is that this practice is really a method of personal revelation. I go to God with a question (either conscious or unconscious), and He uses the means at His disposal to communicate the answer to me. As Nephi says in the Book of Mormon: "the Lord God...speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding," and I can't think of a language I speak better than the one used in the books I love reading! I sometimes wonder if God "led" me to this practice by giving me the impulse to buy all my books and to annotate them. But one thing's for certain: it's now a huge blessing in my life.

In conclusion, I'd encourage you to look for ways God can speak to you, especially those unique to you and your interests. Who knows? Maybe He'll speak to you in the words you pick up from others' conversations as you walk through a public place. Maybe He'll speak to you through the lyrics of songs that get stuck in your head for no apparent reason. I think all of these things and more are possible. Anyway, thanks for reading! I'm off to do some reading of my own.

How Time Unfolds

Recently, I've started to see time in a very different way than I used to. Before, I thought that time was a line, a series of causes and effects that--while perhaps able to go in different directions--is just one-dimensional. But that's not how it is at all. I've come to see that time is more profound than most think it is, since most of time is actually below the surface of our awareness.

Meaningful Coincidences

Let me explain what I mean by appealing to some concrete events as examples. In the past year or so, I slowly began realizing that crucial events in my life--meeting people, encountering books, or learning about opportunities--came at exactly the right point when they needed to come in order for me to get the most benefit out of them. For instance, there's a teacher who I first had in middle school whom I've kept running into, first in high school and then in college, each time without either of us deliberately seeking the other out. It turns out that he's a great friend and that he has become one of the most powerful influences on my personality. Events like these are shocking, and they're happening with increasing frequency in my life. And their frequency got me thinking: how do these events "work?" What is the metaphysics behind these meaningful coincidences, what Jungians call "synchronistic events?"

Events as Seeds

Pondering on this, an intuition slowly dawned on me. I came to the conclusion that these weird coincidences weren't "caused" by past events as if past events determine what will happen in the future. No, I realized instead that it's quite the opposite: the future determines the past. To put it differently, my meeting with this teacher had always been going to happen; the event itself "gathered" the circumstances it needed to happen for it to occur, and the event made them occur so it could come into existence itself. I guess you could say that this process is like the growth of a seed: a seed is planted imperceptibly in the ground, and there it invisibly grows until it reaches the surface of awareness.

This idea has a few interesting consequences: first, it means that the circumstances leading up to a coincidental event like my meeting with my teacher had a goal or a telos in them; they came into being in order to usher yet another event into being. Think of that--if I'm right, the actions you perform today might have a goal in them you yourself aren't aware of! Random impulses to pick up a book, chance meetings with a stranger on the street, or even freak illnesses might be the initial sprouting of a seed which will mature into something magnificent.

Second, it means that there might be any number of "goals" that are unfolding in a situation. My decision to pick up a book on my shelf might be a way that three or four significant events come into fruition (I think my first encounter with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell in April 2013 was like that). This idea also suggests that future events could "fight" for temporal "real estate" by trying to determine which one of them gets precedence over the other in their unfolding.

Third, my notion of time leads me to think that, just as we know the way a seed unfolds into a plant, we can theoretically figure out the way these event seeds unfold into actual events. Assuming that there are only so many different "species" of event, if you notice the way a situation is beginning to unfold, you could use your knowledge of events' temporal "growth" to discern what will tend to happen in the future. Thus, this notion of time gives a metaphysical foundation for both divination and prophecy. Visions of the future from John the Revelator to Nostradamus to Joseph Smith then don't need to be exact; aside from the heavy use of symbolism inherent in communications with the divine, seeing the seed of an event that's just beginning to grow doesn't rule out any number of variations on how that seed unfolds. Thus, depending on what other events or "seeds" interfere, I imagine that the "end of the world" could turn out in many different ways, despite the fact that the prophecy remains essentially true.

The Science

Finally, I don't think that there's any way this necessarily conflicts with any science. As far as I can tell, most science assumes that time progresses from the past to the future; it doesn't often stop to consider the possibility that the future can affect the past. Though I'm not a physicist, I've heard that some there are some surprising conclusions drawn in quantum physics that support the idea of a past being "caused" by the future.

That's it for this post! If you're curious about these ideas, check out the I Ching, a Chinese oracle text. The theory behind it influenced a lot of my conclusions here.

3-D Truth: A Doctor Who Parable

Guess what, everyone? Doctor Who, my favorite TV show on the air, premieres its ninth series tonight!

Partying aside, I think it's the perfect time for me to write a post I've had stewing in my head for a long time: a blog post about the nature of truth, using an episode from Doctor Who's last season (the one called Flatline) as a metaphor.

Invaders from Flatland

The basic premise of Flatline is that a race of aliens from a two-dimensional universe (think Flatland) has invaded our three-dimensional universe. Though it isn't clear at first, they're pretty nasty, and they mean business.

See that red design on the wall there? The Doctor explains that it's a human nervous system, taken from a human being the 2-D aliens have "sucked" into the floor, "flattened," and dissected. That's not a way I want to go. But ignoring the macabre details of what must have happened, I think that these 2-D aliens have a profound lesson to teach us, and that's because I think they're a metaphor for us.

On 3-D truth

What do I mean? Well, in a way we're two-dimensional beings. When I look at a tree, I can only see a 2-D "snapshot" of one side at a time; I can only ever intuit the tree's 3-D nature by walking around it and looking at all the angles. But here's the thing: that means we never see the tree as it actually is. In fact, we never see anything as it actually is; whether it's a toad, a spoon, or my grandmother, I can only ever see one "face" of a 3-D thing at time, and so its complete nature is hidden from me.

That doesn't stop us, however. Like the aliens in Doctor Who, we stumble into a higher-dimensional world trying to capture it, to dissect it, to "pin it down." Whether in technology, business, or science (especially science), the human protocol for the last few hundred years has been to a) assume that--if we try hard enough--we can know anything, and b) poke, prod, dissect, and disassemble everything in that pursuit. But the whole effort is completely misguided. Like the famous story about blind men examining an elephant, no one perspective of the way things are is ever true. Period. What looks a certain way from one perspective looks completely different from another perspective. So if we try to develop a grand "theory of everything," we're then doing exactly what those 2-D aliens were doing: violently trying to subject three-dimensional reality to our two-dimensional perspective.

What should we do, then? Simply be content to "circumspect" reality, to circle around it enough that you can intuit its nature without ever being able to "say" how it is. And what happens when you do this is amazing--you realize that seemingly contradictory ideas don't have to exclude one another; they can both be true at once. Just as Joseph Smith said, "by proving contraries, truth is made manifest," we can know real truth once we learn to think on both sides of a contradiction, to leap those boundaries with ease.

Anyway, that's it for my epistemological rant. Happy Who-day!

The Scripture in You

A long time ago, I wrote a post that said there are two Books of Mormon--an "outer," literal one, and an "inner" one, closer to both God and your life. I want to expand on that point today, and I'll do it by talking about one of my favorite Book of Mormon chapters, 2 Nephi 27.

Waking up hungry

This chapter is famous for being what Book of Mormon scholars call a "Midrash," a Hebrew literary form that weaves together a sacred text and a commentary on that text. In this chapter, the sacred text is Isaiah's prophecies on the latter days (Isaiah 29, specifically) and Nephi gives the commentary. Isaiah talks about how darkness and apostasy will cover the earth in the last days, giving this poetic description:

"And all the nations that fight against Zion, and that distress her, shall be as a dream of a night vision; yea, it shall be unto them, even as unto a hungry man which dreameth, and behold he eateth but he awaketh and his soul is empty; or like unto a thirsty man which dreameth, and behold he drinketh but he awaketh and behold he is faint, and his soul hath appetite; yea, even so shall the multitude of all the nations be that fight against Mount Zion" (2 Nephi 27:3)

When I came across this verse doing a recent pass-through of the Book of Mormon, I realized that this describes me pretty well, at least at times. But I think it describes all of us to one degree or another--who hasn't wanted something with all their heart, only to find that they didn't feel any better once they got it? I was this way with video games all through junior high, for instance. I would anticipate games like Spore or Fable II for months or even years, only to "wake up" dissatisfied--like a hungry man dreaming of food--when I finally got to play it. You can also see this in politics a lot: people look forward to electing a candidate who they think will solve all the country's problems, but find out when he gets into office that he was average at best.

To put a long story short, the earth isn't heaven, an idol isn't God, and muladhara isn't sahasrara. No matter how much we want an earthly thing or person to satisfy all our desires, it won't make the cut; only God can do that. As I see it, Isaiah is saying in the above verse that many will realize this in the last days, coming to know only after great turmoil that they lusted after something ultimately empty. I think that this idolatry works as a definition for all sin. Whenever we sin, we want infinite satisfaction from a finite source, something that can obviously never happen. The only way to be happy is to see all things as means to God, Who is the source of our being in the first place.

Your inner Book

But Isaiah and Nephi aren't done. Nephi puts a twist on Isaiah's prophecy when he writes what happens after the world has gotten to this idolatrous state:

And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall bring forth unto you the words of a book, and they shall be the words of them which have slumbered.

This passage outwardly talks about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the book written by those "slumbering in the dust," crying from the ground of the long past. But how can we liken this passage to our lives? Because it talks about a divine book that had been "sealed up" to come forth in the latter days, I'll suggest that we read it as commenting on our divine nature, hidden in us like treasure in the ground. So when Nephi says that the Book--which was also hidden away--will come forth, we can liken it to us by saying that the latent divinity within us will eventually express itself.

This can happen whenever we run into something that touches our hearts and opens our spiritual horizons. When we read a piece of scripture, a book, or even an internet article that "shows forth" more than it literally contains in its text, we can be sure that the Book in us has come out. The physical text in front of us then becomes a mirror in which that Book can see itself, a way for us to "translate" that Book into our everyday awareness. It becomes a window to divinity itself, but not just God; my being as it exists in God--my divine potential--actualizes itself through that process of reflective "translation."

The Book of Mormon breaks through history

When I realized all this, I came to an amazing conclusion: this is what the literal Book of Mormon does best. As a revelation of hidden spiritual wisdom, the Book of Mormon is the perfect mirror for our inner Books to reveal themselves. And that's what we do when we read it: the Book of Mormon transposes itself to our life and circumstances--it becomes the Book of Christian, the Book of Daniel, or the Book of Eliza. Through this translation, the Book's story and my life's story become one. My flight into the wilderness is my flight from comfortable bad habits in dating; my "War Chapters" are my fight against temptation's wiles; Christ's coming is the peace that comes after I've been painfully refined by divine fire.

And then I realized something even more remarkable: if the Book of Mormon is supposed to make its stories "at one" with the stories in my life, then it's really manifesting the spiritual in the physical. Mormon scholar Joseph M. Spencer (whom I once met) wrote perhaps the best possible explanation of this idea:

"Any enclosure of the Book of Mormon within a totalized world history amounts to a denial of the book’s unique claim on the attention of the whole world. In the end, then, to take the Book of Mormon as either historical or unhistorical may be to miss the nature of the book entirely. Both positions in the debate about Book of Mormon historicity—-whether critical or apologetic—-are founded on a common, backwards belief. The historicity of the Book of Mormon is not in question. Rather, as Alma makes clear, it is the Book of Mormon that calls the historicity of the individual into question."

The Book of Mormon isn't enclosed within history, and so it's wrong to say that it's either a history or a fiction. And that's how it should be: when we're bound by our bad habits and our past successes or failures, what we're bound by is history itself. Pure history, in a sense, is Satan's plan--our being entirely determined by the past without hope for an irruption into it from eternity. But that's what is needed, and that's exactly what the Book of Mormon gives. The Book of Mormon acts as a bridge from history to eternity and back again; by likening our lives to it, it shows that our lives aren't just the effects of past choices, but instead grow out of seeds from eternity. To read the Book of Mormon is to follow that seed back to its heavenly tree, where we can finally eat from its fruit. So doing, we bring together history and the eternal, even to the point where they're no longer opposed. In fact, I might dare to say that, by reading and likening from the Book of Mormon, we also accomplish something far greater than personal salvation: we help bring about the redemption of the world.

What do Feelings Look Like?

In one of my chastity posts, I quoted a book by the late psychologist Wilson Van Dusen. He's great: as an interpreter of Swedenborg (and an associate of Alan Watts), you can't get much better. In his books, he uses ideas from Swedenborg and other mystical teachers to show his reader "the way to the experience of God," or how to see God as He manifests himself in life. He's a mystic through and through, and he explains many different ways to connect to the divine. But in this post I'm going to focus on just one of them--using "feeling imagery," mainly as he taught it in his book The Natural Depth of Man. (Here's a link to the book's Amazon page)

Van Dusen's big idea here is that fantasies and daydreams aren't evil--far from it. He says over and over that daydreams are actually just the "embodiment" of feeling, ways for feeling to see itself in a mirror. By extension, this is true of all thought; thoughts are just images that reflectively correspond to emotional states.

Most parts making up our experience of life are based in feeling; what I want, how I think, where I'm going, my mental illnesses, and even my mannerisms all spring from feeling's "gentle root." This means that--if I want to learn about my "inner nature"--there are few better ways to do it then by willingly daydreaming. Van Dusen says this: by calming my mind and letting emotions "come up" as feeling images, I can learn about and even change my feelings, moods, and compulsions.

Use your feelings to get over a mood

Van Dusen gives a good explanation of how this process works when he tells the story of someone using it:

"[When caught in a mood,] one should then stop, dwell on sensations, and allow them to amplify into a fantasy. A man is driving home from work with a headache. Having time while driving, he allows his physical sensations to speak up. When he dwells on it, the headache is more a stiffness down the back of the neck or shoulders. To grasp its meaning he portrays this stiffness. He holds out his arms stiffly on the car's wheel. His shoulders and neck are rigid. His face feels as though it were in an angry scowl. The scene amplifies. He is on a battlefield. He has been mortally wounded. He is holding onto a tree stump. If he hangs on someone will come by and notice him and help him."

Here the driver with a headache uses fantasy to "amplify" his discomfort; he takes his scowl and turns it into anger, in turn making his stiffness into a wound on a battlefield. By letting his imagination "unfold" his situation in this way, he starts to understand his emotional state more deeply. When he realizes this, the man decides to fix the situation:

"The martyrlike hanging on the image seems a bit humorous to the driver. In the image the wounded man smiles to himself and says, 'Hell, an injured man is supposed to fall down.' He relaxes, sits back in the car seat with his elbows in his lap. The man on the battlefield relaxes in the warm earth. He leisurely examines little plants springing up nearby out of the ruined earth of the battlefield. The driver concludes he has rigidly forced himself to do everything expected of him, secretly hoping someone would notice his plight and take pity on him. He notices himself, takes pity on himself, and allows himself to relax. Some stiffness in neck and shoulders remains. He concludes that next weekend he will take his family to the state park they want to visit."

When you use fantasy to expand your situation, you can "interact" with that situation in your mind's eye. Like the driver did by letting himself relax, you would put yourself in the scene as an actor, doing with it whatever you think would be best. At this point, the daydream qualifies as "active imagination," a technique coined by Carl Jung where a patient uses fantasy to bring about inner change. And it can go pretty far. You can get to the point where you have whole conversations with inner figures in your head, letting the other person's side of the dialogue spring directly from your unconscious mind.

Use your feelings to understand other people

There is another use for this "feeling imagery," though. While it works for sensations or moods you're trying to understand, it also works to help figure out other people. Van Dusen explains this point, saying:

"At times I find it very difficult to describe what I feel in a woman who is a stranger to me. I have a lot of vague unclear feelings. I allow these to elaborate into a fantasy. I'm going to have a date with her. Let's see how the date should be handled. In one woman I feel I should be very modest about amorous advances. It would feel best if we visited a museum, went to dinner and a concert, and had much chance to talk of our ideas first. For another woman I feel we should go to a dance, be active, live it up. I've shared these fantasies with women in groups usually to find that they are amplifications of accurate perceptions of them."

Just by taking tiny hints--normally under the conscious radar--and expanding them through fantasy, you can know much more about another person than you would otherwise. This tip is especially useful for autistics, many of whom have excellent imaginations despite having poor social skills. Moreover, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the root of "ESP" phenomena: through fantasy, the body and its presentation become a clear window to the mind and spirit within.

Use your feelings to deal with unwanted desires

Finally, you can use this process to work through compulsive thoughts and desires. For instance, Van Dusen writes:

"Once in a small class on phenomenology a young woman implied that she had a dreadful fantasy that coming back. When I asked her about it she implied that it had to do with suicide. She didn't want to talk about it. I encouraged her to try it in the safe environment of the classroom. She was reluctant. She felt if the fantasy were allowed to express itself she would become actively suicidal. Finally she consented. In fantasy she got away from people and walked in the snow. She saw a deep snowbank. With fear and trembling she contemplated crawling into the snow to freeze to death. I encouraged her to go ahead. In her mind's eye she caved out an enclosed cavern in the snow. I asked her what it was like inside. She said, 'Quiet! I hear no sounds of people.'" 

He explains that the young woman had had "too much of people lately," and that the snow was a symbol of her own warmth, her desire to rest comfortably in a small, confined place. To think that this woman could have actually committed suicide if she had refused to let the fantasy fully speak to her! Literalism can thus be very dangerous, not least because seemingly nasty things are often symbols for the benign.

Another example of this use of feeling imagery follows:

"One woman was afraid she was homosexual because she wanted to look at women's figures. I suggested that she look all she wanted in fantasy. The inner wish to look went from legs to breast to her being cuddled like an infant by an older woman. She had been raised without a mother and really wanted the experience of being mothered."

I think that--at least in part--our culture's sexual liberalism is actually a sexual literalism. Here, a woman who thought she might be gay used fantasy to discover that she really just wanted to be mothered. But society today--both conservative and liberal--discourages this introspection. The one side asks you to repress fantasy, and the other side encourages you to act it out without reflection. Both are wrong. Instead, if you have a desire you find morally wrong, consider acting it out in fantasy; don't hold in or act out; act in. Fantasy is safe; if society has considered it dangerous, it's only because it has assumed that fantasies necessarily leads to action. But of course, they don't.

I encourage all of you reading to try this process. As Van Dusen says, it is "perhaps the briefest effective therapy one can do for one's self."

The Fire within Being

I recently decided to revisit one of my favorite books ever, The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard, and I discovered something that I found remarkable. So obviously I decided to make a post about it!

In the chapter called Reverie and Cosmos, he quotes an extraordinary passage by an obscure French writer named Henri Bosco. Speaking of fires burning in a hearth, he writes:

These fires have such a power over our memory that the immemorial lives dozing beyond the oldest memories waken within us at their flame and reveal to us the furthest countries of our secret soul. Alone, on this side of the time which presides over our existence, they brighten days previous to our days and unknowable thoughts of which our thought is perhaps often only the shadow. In contemplating these fires associated with man by millenia of fire, one loses the feeling of the flight of things; time sinks into absence, and hours leave us with no jolt. What was, what is, and what will be becomes by founding for itself the very presence of being; and nothing else in the enchanted soul distinguishes it from itself except perhaps the infinitely pure sensation of its existence. One affirms in no way that he is; but there still remains a faint gleam that he may be. Would I be? one murmurs to himself, and he no longer holds to the life of this world by anything but this hardly articulated doubt. The only human element that remains within us is warmth; for we no longer see the flame that communicates it. We are ourselves that familiar fire which has been burning at ground level since the dawn of the ages, but from which there always rises a living point above the hearth where the friendship of men keeps watch."

When I read this I was dumbstruck by its beauty. What's more--it makes sense, though I can barely explain why! But I want to try explaining that passage here, even if I don't do it justice.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just the echo of something far more real than I am. I get "glimpses" of that reality, mostly just the hint of a thought that intimates far more than it actually "says." These thoughts paint a picture of a life beyond life, one that is nevertheless nestled within life like a walnut in its shell. And what is this life like? It is warm; it is bright. Like a fire, I get the impression that it sustains life from within, linking things together as they share in its warmth. And I can feel that warmth anywhere. When I read a fiction book, for instance, I get a sense of the characters' presence, a distinct "feel" about them that I can't explain in any meaningful way. It's like the sensation of a color, but more the way the color--or a sound--makes you feel. Maybe I could explain it better by saying that what I feel in these books is their emotions, but it goes even deeper than emotions. I feel what the emotions grow from.

I guess the best way to explain it is to simply say that what I feel is fire--a warmth emanating from within everything: people, animals, books, ideas, or even inanimate objects. It comes through especially strong in scripture, almost as if the words there were an open door to the fire's heart. And I find that if I let this fire "lead" me--that is, letting it teach me where to go by what it shows me--I find the ideas I need to find and meet the people I need to meet. I sometimes wonder if the fire is simply leading me to the parts of my being "scattered" throughout the world, almost as if the fire has been "gathering" me.

And the fire also contains wonders. I get impressions that there are hidden universes dozing in even the most mundane things, that the fire in a book or a flower could open up to worlds beyond worlds, and forever on ad infinitum. And when I lose myself in that book or meditatively contemplate that flower, the fires in our depths meet and mingle; it becomes one flame, one depth.

Then I get a thought: could the fire which "reveals the furthest countries of my secret soul" be something we've all heard of before? Could it be that this flame--concealing worlds within even the most mundane things--is actually what we Mormons call the pre-mortal world? I think there's good reason to think so. I believe that when I gaze into the eyes of a loved one, I see into the deepest parts of their soul. In that warm intimacy, our co-mingling depths experience that which those depths spring from: the being of God Himself, the fire from whom all our flames spring.

And there's lots of precedent for this in the writings of spiritual teachers. Emanuel Swedenborg taught that God appears to the angels in heaven as a bright sun, illuminating that whole spiritual country with its warmth of love and its light of truth. But he also taught that human beings have a microcosmic version of that same sun: the aura:

"The angels went on to say that all angels have this kind of aura around them because the Lord does, and that the aura around the Lord is similarly derived from him. This aura is their sun, or the sun of the spiritual world."

Basically, the physical world shines out from the spiritual world and ultimately from God. From this perspective, auras are just the evidence we feel of that eternal fire's warmth and light of that eternal fire as it shines through the people and things we encounter in the world.

The philosopher-esotericist Rudolf Steiner also said something like this. He writes in his Foundations of Human Experience that what we see through our perception is the "reflection" of life as it was before birth. In other words, the things we see in the world are the evidence of something that existed "prior" to their existence, and he writes that when we see them we're using our will to bring them into the actuality of something "after" our life. Think of that--perception as resurrection!

I guess that if this "fire within being" means anything, it's that we get to our origins not by going into the past but by going into our depths. There is a fire at the heart of being, one which opens up into life before life, life within life. So I think that perhaps the pre-existence didn't happen chronologically before this life; maybe it rather exists within this life as the flame expressing itself through our thoughts, actions, and perceptions, that of which we are perhaps only a shadow.