Dream Gates

It’s been said that coincidence is God’s (or Goddess’) way of remaining anonymous. When we experience meaningful coincidence, we often feel that a hidden hand is at work.

In his famous essay on Synchronicity, Jung described the pairing or clustering of events through meaningful coincidence as an “acausal” phenomenon. Certainly, we do not observe causation in the play of coincidence in the way that we can say the kettle boiled because we turned on the burner. A characteristic of coincidence is that it does not have a visible cause.

But this does not mean that there is no cause for coincidence. Most human cultures, across most of recorded history, have believed that there is indeed a hidden hand at work in coincidence: that it is through the play of unusual or unexpected conjunctions, and natural phenomena, that gods or angels or animate forces of nature or other dimensions send messages to humans or actively intervene in our world. Let’s not shrug this off as a “primitive” idea — it has worked, and continues to work, in highly practical ways. And let’s not classify this idea as a “metaphysical” belief.

The forces that cause meaningful coincidence may be quite physical. We miss this because we cannot observe their workings with our ordinary senses and our regular assumptions. These forces include our own thoughts and feelings, and those of others connected to us. They may include the powers that Jung called “archetypes” — as long as we remember that in Jung’s mature thought the archetypes are not structures but “habitual currents of psychic energy” and “systems of readiness for action,” and that they are as much physical as psychic. The physical forces that play with us through coincidence may include our parallel selves in parallel universes, interacting with our world in constant and complex weavings through what quantum physics has taught us to call “interference” patterns, forever shifting the balance of probabilities for any specific outcome.

Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection. Subatomic particles are not separate “things”; they have meaning and identity only through their connections with everything else. Those connections do not depend on physical proximity or causation. Particles that have once been in contact with each other remain connected, or “entangled”,  through all space and time.

Quantum physics also confirms that when we go to the heart of physical reality, there is no separation between mind and matter. Subatomic particles exist in all possible states until they are observed — at which point something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.

Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates — to a greater or lesser degree — with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter. The split between inner and outer — subjective and objective — that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.

As we become more awake to what is going on, we may become synchronicity magnets, “strange attractors” that draw more and more interesting and unexpected encounters and events toward us.

 

Adapted from The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Some of the old ones were reviled as demons or spooks, and consigned to what the priests hoped would be outer darkness, but they could not do that to her, the High One, the Exalted One. That is the meaning of Brig, from which the name Brigid (also Brigit, Brighid, Brigantia of England and Brigindo of eastern Gaul) derives. The church made the goddess a saint, one of the most beloved saints of Ireland, with various biographies, the best of which is recollected in Kildare, where the flame of Brigid burned constantly until Henry VIII, and burns again today. She is a power of the land, and of the deeper world, that the church and the people can agree on. In Ireland and in Scotland, you feel her presence in stones and trees, in high places and in deep wells.

In the stories told at Kildare, the woman Brigid is born at sunrise, as her mother stands straddling a threshold, one foot out and one foot in. When Brigid’s head comes out, the sun’s rays crown her with flame. We can see why she is the patron of people who open doors between the worlds – of shamans, seers and poets – and of all who work with fire, in the peat, in the forge, in the cauldron of imbas, the fire of inspiration.

Marija Gimbutas wrote of her (in The Living Goddesses): “Brigid is an Old European goddess consigned to the guise of a Christian saint. Remove the guise and you will see the mistress of nature, an incarnation of cosmic life-giving energy, the owner of life water in wells and springs, the bestower of human, animal and plant life.”

She is “Mary of the Gael”, and she is the Triple Goddess and Robert Graves’ Three-fold Muse. She is patron of poetry, healing and smithcraft. In Scotland she is Bride, and the White Swan and the Bride of the White Hills. In the Hebrides she is the protector of childbirth.

Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats’s friend, described Brigid in Gods and Fighting Men as “a woman of poetry, and poets worshipped her, for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith’s work, and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another through the night.”

We are now entering the prime time of this High One, when nature awakens around February 1. She may appear as a snake from beneath the earth, even in Ireland, the country without snakes:

This is the day of Bride
the Queen will come from the mound

This is the time of Brigid’s feast of Imbolc which coincides with the lactation of the ewes and the first signs of spring. You know the lambs are coming soon. You see snowdrops pressing up from the hard earth, perhaps through its white mantle.

You offer the gifts of the goddess to the goddess: you pour milk on the ground, you bake and leave out special cakes. To she who spins and weaves life itself, you offer woven fabrics or offer a cloth – a handkerchief, a scarf, a pillowcase – to be blessed as it rests on the earth overnight. To this bringer of fire, you light a candle and offer your heart’s flame.

In the old country, in the old way, young girls carry her images – straw dolls or brideogs – in procession from house to house, and the goddess is welcomed and decked with finery. The dolls are laid on in “bride beds”, with a staff or wand of power resting beside them.

At Imbolc, as on other days, you may raise the High One’s energy with poetic speech. Best to do this by a stream or a spring, or (if you know one) a sacred well.

She does have a fine love of poets and those who bring fresh words into the world. There is a legend that, in one of her womanly forms, Brigid married the great poet Senchan Torpeist,  foremost among the learned fili (bards) of Ireland. It was this same Senchan, it is said, who recovered the great poem known as the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) when it was feared lost forever, by raising the shade of the druid poet Fergus to recite all of the verses.

Among the bevy of Celtic blessings in the great repository know as the Carmina Gadelica, collected by Alexander Carmichael in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland around 1900, some of the sweetest call on Brigid. In “Womanhood of Brigit” (#263 in the Carmina Gadelica)

Brigit of the mantles
Brigit of the peat-heap
Brigit of the twining hair
Brigit of the augury.

Brigit of the white feet
Brigit of calmness
Brigit of the white hands
Brigit of the kine.

Many kinds of protection are then asked of Brigid – safety from death or injury or mishap in many forms. Next comes a verse that makes it plain that Brigid is regarded, among all else, as a guardian of sleep and dreams:

Nightmare shall not lie on me
Black-sleep shall not lie on me
Spell-sleep shall not lie on me
Luaths-luis shall not lie on me.

I need someone more learned in Scots Gaelic than myself to translate Luaths-luis. Its literal meaning seems to be something like “fast-moving lice” for which our modern phrase might be “creepy-crawlies.”

In the “Blessing of Brigit” (numbered #264 in the Carmina Gadelica) we have words that might please the Lady on her feast day, or any day:

I am under the shielding
Of good Brigit each day;
I am under the shielding
Of good Brigit each night.

Brigit is my comrade woman,
Brigit is my maker of song,
Brigit is my helping woman
My choicest of women, my guide

Brigid’s Day is also a fine time for courting, and a time to dream, and seek guidance from dreams.

Here’s an open secret: dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It’s about waking up. In ordinary life, we are often in the condition of sleepwalkers, going through the motions, trying to keep up with pre-set schedules and to meet other people’s expectations and requirements. We let other people determine what’s important. We let them define who we are and what we are able and not able to do and become. Ruled by habit and the need to get through the daily grind, we forget that our lives may have a larger purpose.

Dreaming, we wake up to a bigger story. The moment of awakening may come in a sleep dream, when we get out of our own way and it is easier for us to encounter something beyond the projections of the daily trivial mind and the consensual hallucinations that weave much of our default reality.

The awakening may come in the luminal zone between sleep and waking that the French used to call dorveille, which literally means sleep-wake. It may come in a flash of illumination during a walk in nature, perhaps at the moment when the sun rises above the mountains and opens a path across a lake across a lake.

The awakening may be hard-won. It may come at the price of illness, defeat or despair, of events or recurring disappointments that push us down and back so hard we have to re-vision and revalue everything we once held to be givens. We may have to go through a dark night of the soul before the sun shines at midnight, as ancient initiates described the moment of entry into the full experience of the Greater Mysteries.

The initiation may come in the way familiar to true shamans, when a power of the deeper life seizes us and tears us apart and consents, when we are re-membered, to become our life ally. Angels can appear as fierce as tigers, or as tigers. We don’t really need to go hunting our power; our power is forever hunting us. To awaken to the Guide in our lives, the one who does not judge us and is with us always, we don’t have to cross the desert and fast on the mountaintop unless we have forgotten that the soul of the soul is always near, and is lost to us only when we are lost to him.

I am sitting on an airplane next to a round-faced little girl in pink. Her mother calls her “Mouse” and isn’t interested in talking to her, but she’s full of curiosity about everything from the ventilation system to the creation of the world, so she plies me with questions and stories for the whole flight.

She gazes out the window as we skim the cloudbanks. “It looks like we’re flying on glass.”

She asks, “Have you ever landed from the sky in water?”

“Not in this body.”

“But can people do that?”

“Oh, sure. There’s a kind of plane called a flying boat, or a seaplane, that lands on pontoons that keep it afloat. And then there are rocket ships that splash down and are fished out.”

“Have you ever touched the sun?”

“Not with my hand.”

“Sometimes I feel the sun is following me, real close.”

She thinks for a bit, then comes out with, “How was the world invented?”

“Some people say God made the world. Others say it began with a Bing Bang and the star-stuff has been expanding ever since.”

“I know a boy who says the world was made by God blowing sand.”

I falter a bit, as she quizzes me further on cosmogony and the on how “Cheeses” (it takes me a moment to realize she is talking Jesus) was born. Then she looks up at the air vent and asks me to show her how it works. I demonstrate turning it counter-clockwise to let the air out, clockwise to shut it off.

“Maybe that’s how the universe was made,” Mouse says brightly. “Someone turned everything counter-clockwise.”

She laughs. Her mother looks sullen; it seems Mouse isn’t supposed to laugh.

I am so sorry for Mouse’s mother, because she is missing so much. Kids are the masters of imagination, and we gain so much by listening and sharing their stories, their dreams, their versions of reality. If mom would only listen to Mouse, then perhaps the 11-year-old inside the adult would come alive, bringing energy and joy and everyday magic. I profoundly hope that Mouse will survive the efforts to turn off her world of wonder, and will be able to claim the name and the role in life that pleases her.