 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||
|
|
The Whispering Tree 1 | |
|||||||||||||
|
About ten years ago, I experimented with lucid dreaming and found I could become conscious in a dream, or go directly into a conscious dream (a 'hypnagogic vision'). It was strange and exciting, and slightly alarming with physical shakes and tremors and voices preceding a vision. But although difficult at first, it became increasingly easy, and then too easy. I could not close my eyes to sleep without entering a visionary world, and even awake it might appear. There suddenly seemed a possibility of going mad, and so I closed down the visions with an effort. The Lark Ascending dreams followed as if I had made some repairs to a bridge to the other side. But I thought no more of crossing until my 'Black Madonna' dream, which came after reading this on the Jung Forum: "In summer of 1994 she [Marie-Louise von Franz] was visited by a woman, a medium, who wanted to convince her to collaborate with her; she was certain that the Christian and the Buddhist spirit were presently uniting on the other side in order to save the world. Marie-Louise promised nothing - she wanted first to see what she might dream. The following night she had this dream: She is working in the laundry at the cloister in Einsiedeln. She is given to understand that Jung would come down from heaven to the wedding of the Black Madonna. Marie-Louise is among the one hundred elect who are permitted to take part in the wedding. She then said that the unconscious was indeed preparing a remedy for the world and a union, to be sure not one 'above in the spiritual realm,' but a union of above and below, a union of spirit and matter. Very early on the Virgin Mary was thought to be 'the earth'; the Black Madonna was a nature goddess..." In my dream: 'A plain-clothes policeman takes me aside. From his questions I realise he thinks I have stolen a mobile phone. I say I scarcely use one, and he looks relieved. Then I am kidnapped by an Indian gang. They disguise me as a woman with a child, and bundle me into a van.' The dream is about theft - first the phone and then me. The 'Ambrosia' pages that follow show 'theft' in myth as communication with the gods (or the 'unconscious', in psychological language). The dream suggests an equivalence between phone and me, as we are both stolen; and the communication is linked to the Black Madonna by the disguise. Clearly I have stolen the phone, though I don't seem to realise it - my lucid dreaming experiments began for fun. But now my past is brought up by the policeman, who asks, in effect, if I have been communicating with the gods. When I deny it, I am myself stolen by the Goddess as if to say - Oh yes you have. So in some sense this may be a 'calling' dream, which cannot be resisted without penalty. But who or what is the Black Madonna? She is called a 'nature goddess' above, and von Franz thinks of her as 'matter' uniting with spirit. As a result of the dream I go to the shamanism workshop, where Black Panther re-establishes communication. Then Panther asks me to look for Dione, who is goddess of Nature, the whispering trees and spiritual communication. The workshop centred on ways to communicate with other worlds. Our primary method was the soul-journey, which has something in common with lucid dreaming and hypnagogic visions, and maybe traditions like meditation and Jung's 'active imagination'. But while most of the fifty-five on the course had some success with journeying, I had none. The first step was to find one's 'Axis Mundi'. This is the world tree, or world mountain etc that shamans use to start their journeys to the 3 worlds. I chose a small tree behind the park bench I used for my summer reading. This had become a numinous place, especially through a book by Marie-Louise von Franz called 'The Cat'. But the tree would not let me journey. I returned to the park after the course to get a stronger sense of it, but still no luck. Maybe it was too small. A sunny blue October day drew me into the park with a book called 'The Celtic Wisdom of the Trees' - the last birthday present from my mother. The plan was to see if any other tree might come forward as my axis mundi. With the help of a passing Scottish couple I identified an oak and a chestnut tree and collected various leaves. I cannot say any of the trees in the park spoke to me; and as I leafed through the 20 trees in the book, only the oak seemed to be in the park at all. Then a tree did speak. I turned a page and found 'The Whispering Tree'. Jane Gifford says it is the tree of the autumn equinox (Sep 21), also known as 'the Quaking Aspen'. The leaves of the aspen are almost round and "catch the slightest breeze so that they tremble and flutter with a soft, rustling, whispering sound". I looked at the tree by my bench, which was a great whisperer. Its leaves did not seem round enough. |
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
|
