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Dreams: The Voice of Nature

Dreams, said Carl Jung, are the voice of nature within us. Hermann Hesse predicted that when enough individuals begin to listen to na­ture’s voice and pay heed to their own dreams — including their visions, in­tuitions, and instinctive promptings — the greatest revolution in all history will unfold. This is not an ending, but rather a beginning.

When each of us chooses to embrace our true self and follow our own star, the real revolution will commence.

Express Your Dreams in Waking Reality

Carl Jung says that anyone can dream the most fantastic and important dreams. The key is to find the courage and will to express them, to anchor them in waking reality. Otherwise it’s a waste and a kind of psychic self-inflation to think, “Well, I have these grand dreams and visions, so aren’t I grand.”

Of course, there will be all kinds of inner resistances to doing this work. You’ll think to yourself, “Oh, this is just a waste of time and effort; that ex­perience wasn’t so important after all,” or, “I’m not really worthy of this.” But these inner obstacles must be overcome. They are demonic tricks of the small self — the culture-bound, “civilized” ego — to keep your deeper, natu­ral, truer self at bay.

In Joseph Campbell’s terms, the genuine hero is one who returns from the journey capable of offering boons to others. Those who are able to end their own world, then, must take it upon themselves to help others end theirs.

No Blame & No Going Back

Once a visionary insight has been formulated and expressed, openly and publicly, there is no going back. You either shoulder the responsibility for making it real, or you shirk it. There is only one way in which there is a mid­dle ground. As René Descartes observed, if you are tearing down your house in order to rebuild it from the foundation up, it makes sense to find tempo­rary shelter — a lean-to or trailer will do in a pinch — while the brand new structure is being constructed.

Thus, to borrow a familiar phrase from the I Ching, there is “no blame” if you end your old world gradually, in stages, while creating a whole new world to inhabit. Sometimes the destruction of the old mental habitation may be so sudden and catastrophic that there will be no opportunity for piecemeal solutions. This is what author and consciousness-explorer Bruce Moen aptly refers to as a “belief systems crash.” In other instances, however, it may be feasible to ease the transition in a somewhat more gentle fashion.

This logically leads to the next point: Just as ice cream comes in many flavors, so revolutions come in many different colors. In other words, not everyone who seeks to follow the promptings of their true inner self, heed the call of nature, and listen to their heart, will necessarily experience a full-blown mystical ecstasy or a visionary insight into the ultimate nature of reality. There are many different ways to end your world. Some are more subtle than dramatic, but these are no less significant on that account.

Different Ways to End Your World

It just so happened, for example, that, as I was working on this very book chapter, the latest issue of my college alumni magazine arrived in the mail. The article advertised on the front cover of the periodical read: “Act Two: Five Alums Who Ditched Their Careers and Followed Their Hearts.”

This fascinating piece featured a successful patent attorney who chucked his law practice in order to follow his lifelong passion: balloon sculpture; a financial services guru who opened up a café that features organic and fair-trade food, housed in a building designed with renewable resources, energy-efficient products, and recycled materials; a forty-five-year-old woman who gave up a lucrative career in the music industry in order to make ceramics; and an M.B.A. who spent twenty-five years developing and marketing medi­cal devices, but decided, at the age of sixty, to become a minister instead. Each of these intrepid individuals is no less a heroic “world-ender” than Jane Roberts, Bob Monroe, or Tony Cicoria.

Shatter Your Mask

By following their dreams and allowing the natural faces of their true inner selves to shatter their care­fully contrived, artfully constructed, culturally sanctioned masks, they are removing the underpinnings — one pin at a time, of course — of a dysfunc­tional system that thrives on fear, guilt, deception, manipulation, exploita­tion, boredom, negativity, thoughtlessness, literalism, dogmatism, and the overall constriction of consciousness.

Any chink made in the armor is a major victory, heralding the day when the light will shine through all of the disparaging mythic memorabilia that keeps us mentally preoccupied and satisfied captives in what Plato called the darkness of the cave of ignorance.

On the day when we can all laugh at the Myth of the Great Ending, we will finally see it revealed for what it truly is: a seriocomic road sign pointing inward to our own deepest being, and outward to its own inevitable and felicitous dissolution.

This article was excerpted with permission from the book:

The Myth of the Great Ending: Why We've Been Longing for the End of Days Since the Beginning of Time
by Joseph M. Felser.

This excerpt was reprinted with permission of the publisher, Hampton Roads Publishing. ©2011. www.redwheelweiser.com

Click here for more info and/or to order this book from Amazon.

About the Author

Joseph M. Felser, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago and is an associate professor at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of The Way Back to Paradise: Restoring the Balance between Magic and Reason. His work appears regularly in scholarly journals and he was invited to give the Keynote Address at the world-renowned Monroe Institute’s 20th Professional Seminar in March 2006. Visit his website at www.magicandreason.com and/or www.everythingtriestoberound.com.

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