The Dragon's Treasure

CONTENTS 18 Steps for Becoming a Wizard in Your Universe Preface Introduction I Dreams II My Dreamtime III Awakening IV Of Dragons and Ships: The soul and its relationship to the ego V How to throw a wrench into the gears of the creation VI Protecting the Treasure, taking care of the soul VII A Still, Quiet Place VIII The Role of Religion IX Love, Hate, Neglect, and Socialization X Choice, Free Will, and the Lizard Brain XI The Power of Intention XII What About Time? XIII It Is Never Good Enough XIV Death, Yours, Mine, Ours XV Magic and Transformation XVI I Am, We Are Dream Glossary Suggestions for Further Reading Endnotes Preface “People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” —Joseph Campbell Ignore this section at your peril! When I open a new book, I’m often in such a hurry to get into it that I skip the introductory material, assuming it’s only going to tell me about what I’m about to read. Though there is some of that here, I’ve also included the foundation for the book’s intended meaning and an informal glossary of terms that are not defined in the text but are found throughout. Perhaps most importantly, the learning starts here. If I were reading this book for the first time, I realize it would be a mistake to skip this section. For thirty-five years, I have written down my dreams and as a Psychologist interpreted dreams as a diagnostic tool when working with children. Most often, the children I worked with could not articulate what was going on with them and could not even name the emotions they were experiencing. It was as though they were lost in a fog. As the years passed, I began to notice that communication was happening with these children on so many levels, and they were “projecting” their inner lives everywhere—in their behaviors, beliefs, drawings, and dreams. It was as though you could “see” them creating their world. A teacher of dream analysis, Dr. Jeremy Taylor, with whom I studied informally on a number of occasions, said during a dream analysis group that, “It’s all projection.” I understood what he said as a clinician, psychological diagnostician, and as a spiritual seeker. The spiritual seeker in me was beginning to see that the reality I saw was something that I created through the filters of my life experiences. Yes, some of that reality was agreed upon by others, and some of it was not. Yet there was an elusive, objective reality that perhaps none of us can know given our hard-wiring, but I was still driven to look for it. Buddhists speak of a veil of ignorance that cannot be lifted by learning new things about reality. They know that reality is illusory—that is not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that there are things that get in our way of perceiving reality. Even our most precious memories are inevitably just distorted pictures of reality. Memories are not static, like the words on the printed page. When one brings out a memory, like a book from the bookshelf, it interacts with one’s current consciousness, and this interaction changes it. When the memory goes back onto the bookshelf, it’s not what it was before it was removed. Do this several times over a lifetime, and one wonders what of the original memory is real. One has no way of knowing. In my workshops, I used to present a ball with one side painted yellow and the other blue. When I held the ball up to the audience, they saw blue and would argue that reality if I were to contradict them and say it was yellow. As long as each party remained fixed to their positions, each comprehended a different reality. But neither party saw reality, just a version of it. In part, this demonstration was to illustrate that neither of us could see reality until we were able to change positions to see that the ball was indeed blue and yellow, This works to illustrate how an illusion of reality is created. Reality is our cognitive construction of it—that is to say, our awareness of it—and it requires a shift in position to broaden the construction. Your magic cannot be performed from a rigid perspective; your wizardry depends on being fluid. The inner world of dreams has helped me to understand what is going on behind my own veil, fog, or illusion and has helped me to negotiate my own reality. The Dragon’s Treasure presents a simple way to access the inner world through the careful interpretation of both your sleeping and waking dreams. There’s an inner world? What have we done to our inner world? Our society seems to have created a schism between the inner and outer worlds to such a degree that most people don’t believe in the inner world. Some people call this inner consciousness the ghost in the machine to belittle it and then deny its existence. Others consider it to be no more than an abstraction and thus not tangible and not open to manipulation. They say if it can’t be manipulated, it cannot be used, and then what good is it? While still others may acknowledge its existence, they deny it has anything to do with them. Ours is a society where we don’t look too deeply, perhaps out of fear that we will have to confront our fragility, incredible vulnerability, confusion, or lack of control, and perhaps our death. The society I live in seems to operate as though what people do is who they are—for example, stay-at-home mom, astrophysicist, engineer, firefighter, garbage collector, student, or homeless person. We seem to define each other as functions or by occupation, and that can lead to looking at people for what value they have to the observer. How much do we really get to know each other? How closely do we study another person to get a sense of who they really are? I look back at my parents and realize that I did not know them. I have judgments based on limited and subjective observations, but I never looked closely to know them. I regret this. What I’m left with is my version of their truth. How much I lost! The society I live in seems to careen from one extreme to the other—from the overly rational, linear, super-specialized application of science to the irrational denial found in our politics and religions. This has polarized us and has only served to further alienate us from each other. All this has cost us the ability to produce magic in our lives. At a very basic level, the society we live in has helped form our awareness of reality. This book will bring the reader into consciousness—for good or bad—to be at choice with reality. As explained in Chapter X “to be at choice” is to be able to say yes or no to any event or any request. What is this book about? Am I any closer to an answer to the questions of life, death, and meaning? A little, I think, and I have discovered some interesting things about what we might be and why everything is here. I have also generated an enormous number of questions for which I have no answers, but the questions are also worth pondering. This book is a quest. It is not a journey—not in the traditional way in which we think of or even experience journey. In the section where I discuss time, I suggest that time may be an illusion and that if this is so, then in whatever happens, the when of it happening is incidental to the meaning of the event. I present this concept here to explain ahead of time why the dated dream events spread throughout the book don’t seem to follow any chronological order. Instead, I have attached dreams to themes and ideas that I have engaged throughout my life and use these dreams to illustrate the process of journaling and interpreting.