The Field Revealed

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One of the most curious things about dreams is how they mirror our inner world. Other people portray qualities we are adopting and discarding, depending on how we view them.

Ideas flow through the mind, like a digestive organ, but some core part of us is constantly in flux and growing. Dreams give us a glimpse into a field that transcends our normal sense of boundaries.

The same field of potential that captures our attention while dreaming is activated in a curious way when we experience synchronicity. A ‘coincidental’ repetition of symbols shocks us into a type of awakening where time, space, in here, and out there appear incongruent. This sense of weirdness reveals how little we actually understand the field.

The Field Generates Itself

The field shows us how the cause and effect are one. The field is boundless and generated within itself. It transcends the limits of our awareness and senses. The field allows light to travel from the sun, keeps planets in orbit and propels electro-magnetic and sound waves. We may not see the field, but experience its effects.

Causality too, is not thoroughly understood. There are aspects of the field that seem to have a preference for remaining intangible. We see duality where particles exist simultaneously as waves. The act of observing always seems to collapse the wave function.

In the delayed choice experiment, we can know a wave has emerged. However, the act of observing it turns it back (as if in time) into a measure of particles.

It is as if we were not intended to see the wave function of the boundless field.

Physicist, John A. Wheeler described how reality brings itself into existence in a loop: “Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics."

Shadow work, nightmares and the way dreams excite the psyche show us that just because we cannot see something by day, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We dream about what we are failing to acknowledge, and it is always a potent and valuable part of us.

Like gravity, the field has the potential to change our orbit or field of focus. But gravity is also a condition of the ‘heaviness’ of the subject/object. In this way, the field is both the cause and the effect. The same energy we hold and protect excites its own release.

Symbols in Dreams

Dreams that take place in the dark can show elements that are deeply unconscious. Dreams that revolve around excrement reveal how we are attempting to release something we are holding that is not healthy or good for us. The mind is alot like a digestive organ, assimilating what is nourishing and releasing the unnecessary.

If we consider the adjective we would use to describe the people that appear in our dreams, we can understand the part of us undergoing examination. The dreaming mind sees life as a mirror to understand itself.

When we dream of being on a train, the railroad tracks give us a sense that wherever we are going, another factor is in control. We cannot turn right or left – we can merely jump on or off as we explore commitment or other's expectations of us.

In addition to the every-day imagery that shapes our dreams, we see how we access a type of field of potential when dreaming. I call it a field because it represents an area that resides beyond the personal unconscious and seems to be a realm of shared imagery. The mythologically inspired symbols that give shape to archetypes in dreams can be activated, even while the dreamer has no previous knowledge of this ancient symbolism.

The enchantment factor at play in dreams awakens us to the part of us that had remained inaccessible. The body is paralyzed, while the mind is coaxed to come out of hiding and explore. In this way, the glaring light of ego is eclipsed, so the more obscure elements that are hidden away can be revealed.

The Unusual as a Beacon

The symbols in a dream which are most bizarre become the most profound in guiding us toward a breakthrough. In the same way, the bizarre aspect of synchronicity becomes a clue that something auspicious is quaking in the psyche. It is auspicious because its appearance can herald the awakening to success and wellness. Synchronicity can be a message, a type of initiation or test, or it can be a validation.

Dreams are the metaphorical language of how we are feeling. By day, we are also looking at experience in terms of what it means to us and how we feel. We know the mind creates our dreams, but fail to recognize how the mind also creates our experiences. This is the essence of the observer-participant factor observed in physics.

Dreaming and Synchronicity

Synchronicity is how meaningful events transpire without any obvious cause and effect relationship. The same theme that is being activated and explored in the dreamscape seems to move into a pre-conscious phase, where we have the opportunity to examine it on the path.

I commonly see how dreamwork breakthroughs precede conscious awareness by weeks. Clients often report increased synchronicity during this time period because the excited field ‘in here’ seems to open to the field ‘out there.’ Eventually, we come to see that this separation is an illusion.

Actively working with our dreams does increase an awareness of synchronicity, but we can experience synchronicity without remembering our dreams. Through dreamwork, however, we are able to see how the mind organizes reality.

Excited Anticipation and Synchronicity

Processing through difficult decisions can also activate synchronicity. Because portions of the psyche are in a state of excited eruption, it can spill out into waking life. Just as we are no longer limited by how portions of the psyche were once constellating around one orbit of focus, the same shift in awareness opens us to a new field of potential ‘out there.’

Synchronicity provides answers in the same way dreams point us toward true north. The same mechanism that draws us to work through unresolved conflict by exploring dream symbols and their associations can lead us to a similar breakthrough when making a decision.

The symbolism will capture our attention with the same enchantment and can be interpreted with the same meaning as dream symbols. Just like dreams, life shows us what we need to know.

The Illusion of Separateness

We have the sense that our mindset has some sort of influence on what we experience. If we are in a good mood, life seems to flow more easily than when we are mad, afraid or frustrated. From the measurements scientists attempt at the quantum level, we witness how we are all part of an observer-based reality.

During dreaming, normal consciousness abates. By day, it remains in service to the ego and its mission of maintaining the status quo. The difference between the enlightenment achieved while dreaming and the awakening that is necessary to achieve a more peaceful existence is our sense of being open.

While we are caught up in the illusion of being separate from what we encounter, we fail to witness the field of potentials that become more obvious through synchronicity. This sense of separateness or unnatural boundaries we have placed upon the field and our perception of it, can make the liberation of wholeness and individuation a lifelong quest.

Most people interpret the field (or what they observe) as 'this or that', good or bad, right or wrong. In this way, it is classified or measured and the potential is lost in the same way observing collapses the wave's ability to teach us about transcendence and timelessness.

Dreams teach us how we can transcend ego to look into the potential of the unknown. Synchronicity and even perceived conflict, are ways the psyche excites its own release.

Polishing the Mysterious Mirror

A field exists throughout time and space as a mathematical entity. The act of measuring, judging or interpreting imprisons us in a world of discrete particles. In other words, it limits our ability to see the true nature of reality.

We can open a pomegranate and observe the seeds in one state, while failing to see its potential to become an entire tree over time. We observe a sugar cube, allow it to dissolve in water and believe it has disappeared. A measurement captured in one state is only part of what it might be.

What is 'it' - when we allow 'it' to transcend this or that?

In Tao te Ching Chapter 10 we are told: “While polishing your mysterious mirror, can you see the world without blemish?” The blemishes we place on perception come from judgment. We tarnish the mystery through classifications of good and bad, blotting out life's potential, so that we only see the familiar. Rather than awaken into the mystery, we lick our wounds in the comfort of a more bland existence.

But we are not told to polish our eyeglasses; we are told we must polish the mirror. This is the sense that like dreams, life is mirroring the condition of our inner world.

Polishing the mysterious mirror is the purification of the mind through fasting. This fasting isn’t about what we eat, but how we react and respond. A polished mirror has no blemish as we achieve Ming or enlightenment. We are able to let go of the illusion that the inside is separate from the outside and open to the endless field.

We call it the void, but the void is where potential is most ripe. It is like the singularity that brought about the Big Bang. It is in that place where nothing exists that the binding is loosened and we are liberated.

Through Ming, one learns to witness events and the Absolute as one reality.

The Absolute is Wholeness

The obscure can only become visible when we stop re-creating our story, or our attempts to shape the mystery into an answer. We no longer fund projections of the Other, and all that we defend against.

The Absolute connects us all, as we eliminate any sense of boundaries. To the mind that is still - the entire universe surrenders because we embrace rather than defend. Our sense of being can become like the breath, floating endlessly on the wind, as we give it away and laugh when it returns to us.

In and out - boundless in the field.

W.B. Yeats wrote: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

In Book 13.1 of Chuang Tzu: “Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human Spirit! The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things.”

Because the field is boundless, we transcend ourselves when we can hover at the threshold of perception, letting go of any awareness of separateness. We can open to the Absolute, its depths mirrored and unfathomable within us.

In this condition, synchronicity resonates from a greater field of awareness. As if we are dreaming, life tells us everything we need to know. We can see what lays hidden, and it confirms our direction and authenticity.

Witness the Great Turning

Consciousness is like the sun that can block out the stars so that we fail to see the Great Turning. The oracles on this site are a way of allowing consciousness to move beyond its subjective orientation. Oracles allow us to explore the obscure and enchant us with the same information found in dreams.

Whatever we avoid by day becomes the fodder of our dreams. Synchronicity is how this happens while we are awake. Its cause and effect are intertwined in a very personal and meaningful way.

The inaccessible stirs, and time can take on a sense of predictability through deja vu, where unconscious knowledge reaches consciousness. This 'bubbling' of instinctive awareness is associated with our ‘coming-to-be-real’ as we move toward authenticity.

Chapter 7:6 of Chuang Tzu says we can make the mind like a mirror. “It conducts nothing and anticipates nothing; it responds to what it sees, but does not retain it.”

Meng allows us to see the ‘carved block’ of experience, but hold to the ‘uncarved block,’ the Absolute, the totality, the Tao.

And the mind that is empty resonates most completely with nature. Without looking out of the window, one can see the entire universe.