The Tattva Experiment: Dreaming Yellow Squares

I’ve done dream work for many years. I keep journals, both written and visual, to record symbols, factors and outcomes. I experiment with levels of lucidity. And I’ve become quite adept at interpreting dreams from a Jungian perspective.

Over time I’ve come to understand there are ordinary dreams, which feel like the processing of information, and then there are big dreams, which feel like they are saying: “Hey you! Sit up and listen. This is important.” Those dreams are the ones that seem to have an ‘otherness’ to them, as though what’s in the mind of the dreamer is being combined with something that resides far deeper than we normally go. For me, these are accompanied by an omnipresent glow, and the sense that a guide is communicating. Sometimes this type of dream is sporadic, but more often they come as a result of active scrying for information or probing the mystical.

Most recently I decided to experiment with tattvas in conjunction with dreaming to see if it would produce any insightful results, and since a few of your have expressed an interest in my ‘mind explorations’, I thought I’d share this one.

Tattvas

Tattvas are elements or aspects we can use to analyse reality, and feature in several eastern religions. In some traditions they are considered to be aspects of a deity, but in Hindu Tantrism they are seen as global energy tides as follows:

Akasa (Spirit Tattva) – symbolised by a black egg
Vayu (Air Tattva) – symbolised by a blue circle
Tejas (Fire Tattva) – symbolised by a red triangle
Apas (Water Tattva) – symbolised by a silver crescent
Prithvi (Earth Tattva) – symbolised by a yellow square

This version of tattvas was also adopted by The Golden Dawn in their mystical practices. In accordance with that tradition and its instruction on familiarisation with the symbols, I have done work with these in the past: I have a set of cards with each symbol on and every combination of two, and use them to meditate upon. For the dream experiment, I decided to begin with Prithvi: an arbitrary, or perhaps intuitive, choice. Continue reading “The Tattva Experiment: Dreaming Yellow Squares” →

January 26, 2019 2

5 Non-fiction Books that Shaped Me

I’ve always loved reading non-fiction as much as fiction, and have a particular attraction to all things philosophy and psychology. I always manage to take something away from every book I read and feed it into my worldview, so I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a little bit about the ones that have had the biggest impact on me over the years. I’ve chosen my top 5, listed in the order I read them.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra

When I was 15, I wrote an essay on my typewriter called ‘The Personal God’. It wasn’t for school, and it wasn’t really planned out; it just sort of wrote itself. In it, I set out my reasons for believing that God was created subjectively in the minds of men, and that the concept of a mythical overlord was becoming less relevant as we developed as a species. It wasn’t great: I was 15. But it meant that when I saw a documentary about Nietzsche on TV a few months later – the first time I’d ever heard of him – I was immediately drawn to his ideas. I got a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as soon as I could, devoured it, and covered it in pencil notes.

Apart from the opinions on women he expresses in the book, which frankly seem primitive compared to his other musings, there are many themes that made a big impression on me. The will to power, the bowels of existence; herd morality. His succinct descriptions of the suffering that is so very human and rooted in the self. The idea that the only meaning we can create in this absurdity we call life is that which we make for ourselves. His existentialism set my mindset up nicely to understand the ideas of Thelema a couple of years later, and I have continued to return to this book and his others many times. I think there is an appropriate Nietzsche quote for every situation in life.

2. C.G. Jung – The Essential

Jung’s psychology has had a profound impact on the way I see the world. Generally, a major criticism of his work is that he was swayed too readily by mystical fancies, yet the very fact he was not afraid to face the metaphysical and the unknown is one of the reasons he appeals to me so much. His thought attempts to bridge the gap between science and religion, the rational and the irrational, and had he been around to see modern developments in neuroscience I think he’d have had a lot more to give.

Science or pseudoscience, Jung’s model of the psyche works very well for me. I use it to analyse my mental states, my dreams, my path to individuation (which is remarkably similar to both alchemy and, at times, taoism), and the way I interact with others. His thoughts on the collective unconscious and personal myth constantly feed into my creative work.

I chose this book as the one that shaped me simply because it is the first one of his I read. I borrowed it from my local library when I was about 16 or 17, and was hooked on Jung’s style straight away. Since then I have been working my way through all of his books, including the stunning Red Book, the full folio version of which sits pride of place on my bookshelf.

Continue reading “5 Non-fiction Books that Shaped Me” →

September 10, 2017 20

Animus

You have to build your difference, they say.
You are divided for love.
But I don’t know who you are.
Do you know who I am?
I can feel your fingers reaching out to me,
so close to having material form it hurts
like an unstruck sound in my heart.

You are surely a reflection,
but when I look for you in the mirror
the only me there is I.
I project the idea onto all of my lovers,
trying to understand the shape of you,
then when they are gone, I retract you
back into the darkness of shadow.

I saw you in the theatre last night.
Three stages, three shows, three facets of you.
I danced with each in my dreams.
You had raw, bleeding knees from the crawl;
an attempt to save yourself from fiction, no doubt.
But one tug on my necklace, one cry from within
and I knew the fall was real.

May 14, 2017 5

The Drowned World – J G Ballard

I have a complicated relationship with the novels of J G Ballard. I am drawn to his concepts; they always sound like stories I will love, but there is something in his style that deeply unsettles me. I come away feeling defensive, as though I have been spoken to in an arrogant and assertive manner, and sometimes even physically sick, but somehow I always end up reading more.

Now I have read The Drowned World, I believe I have identified the root of this strange feeling. I tried hard to find a particular quote from C G Jung at this point: I know it is in Memories, Dreams, Reflections but short of re-reading the whole book I couldn’t find what I was looking for in time for this review. Somewhere in that book, Jung refers to the voice of the unconscious mind coming across as pompous and blunt. That is what I think J G Ballard’s trick is; he speaks from, and to, the unconscious mind.

Continue reading “The Drowned World – J G Ballard” →

April 22, 2017 18