A week ago, I stayed longer than usual in the state between dream and full wakefulness. This time it had a special meaning because what I dreamed and what I was in the waking state was consistent and emphasized both sides of the same experience. As I floated over to my waking state, my attention remained unchanged and only transfered from participating in the dream as an observer to ”thinking” in it actively in my wakefulness. The content of the dream was the same and only shifted to my usual inner reflection of what appears by itself from somewhere beyond me. This made it very clear to me that the flow that we are a constant part of and originate from is the same thing regardless of my waking relationship to it. Whether I’m awake or not, and regardless of my ”awake” opinion about it, or what I think or feel about it, I’m still a part of it. It is from here that we enter life. This was the purpose of the dream. And that ”dreaming” intervenes in my life whether I am asleep or awake. I am there as an active participant whether I acknowledge this relationship or not. This is what I’ve lived with all my life. Perhaps this in a different context could have had a different meaning. But now this ”dream” came after I for a while had doubts about the importance of the flow of life for me due to our culture’s strictly one-sided reliance on how we should relate to the waking side. Also, a week or so later, I opened a book I have had for a while that I have not yet read and I encountered this text.
”A man is both himself in one sense, but he is also ’another’ in the sense that he participates in an earlier, transitionary form of existence. His totem, whatever that it may be, becomes a mirror in which he can see reflected back at him his ideal form prior to its manifestation as himself. This means that embedded in the idea of totemic identity is the primordial encounter with the unmanifest Principle and the realm of manifestation in the mode of duality. A man only becomes ’himself’ at the moment when he detaches himself from his ideal state(as the transitional type in the dreaming) and takes up the garb of conditional existence. Implicit in the concept of totemic identity is this relationship between the the transitional type(unburdened with self-consciousness) and the conditional world of mortality and change. The totem, however acts as an Ariadne’s thread, allowing a man to find his way back to his preconscious existence in the Dreaming. He finds himself forever linked to his own origins, both as a spiritual being and as one of nature’s manifestations.
-James G Cowan”
Edward Edinger a jungian analyst formulated the same experience like this:
“This other being is the other person within ourselves–that larger and Greater Personality maturing within us. It is the inner friend of the Soul. That’s why we take comfort whenever we find that inner friend depicted in a ritual. For example, the friendship between Mithras and the Sun god.
”It’s the representation of a friendship between two men, which is simply the outer reflection of an inner fact. It reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the Soul into whom Nature herself would like to change us. That other person, who we also are, and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of diascury, one of whom is mortal, and the other immortal. And who, though always together, can never be made completely one.
“The transformation process strives to approximate them to one another, but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in our own house. We should always prefer to be ‘I’ and nothing else. – Edward Edinger. ”
Life does not just happen. It is built into episodes. And its contents appear as parts linked to each other. I think this is the teaching that makes us human. Also, many of our culture’s problems seems to come from an absence to our inner flow, and our current view of its presence in our daily lives. The scientific equivalent of the psychic encounter with the unmanifest Principle and the realm of manifestation that we participates in, is the evolutionary thought. That is, ”the outer reflection of an inner fact”.
I also believe that this is what Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson fail to appreciate in an evolutionary and existential sense. Since self-consciousness forms the basis of every human being’s experiences of himself and the world we belong to. It is too gross an intellectual tool to explain all life with a psychic product such as evolution. We imagine our physical relationship to the world with psychic means as we reflect on what it consists of, and formulate the processes that create it. It is not just an external phenomenon. It is also an inner personal relationship transferred to the outer. It is what we transmit that makes it alive. For good and for worse it is how we do that that fills our news with what we make of it.