Joining the Dance: Moving from Complexity, Imagination & the Deeper Dreaming

Path Notes #11

When the troubles of the world overwhelm me, when I can’t find my way out of the distressed hamster wheel of my own mind, I take myself out onto the land with wild prayers for Earth’s imagination to find me.

Geneen Marie Haugen, Wild Imagination

Before humans wrote, we spoke.

Before speaking, we sang.

Before singing, we danced.

Before dancing, just like grizzly bears and forests, we dreamt.

But before we dreamt, we emerged from a deeper dreaming.

And it’s still dreaming us.

It might seem like a strange and insensitive moment to be musing about dreaming. All too many find themselves slipping into a very real waking nightmare right now. One in which the most terrifying figures and forces of the dreamworld appear to have slipped through the cracks to wreak havoc in the dayworld.

A dayworld whose chaoplexic[i] dynamics are eating our systems approaches and our fragile uncertainty tolerance for breakfast. A dayworld stalked by hungry ghosts possessed by their own unmetabolized shadows.

Like Ged, the young mage in Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, who opens a portal between the worlds to show off his power to his peers, we have unleashed forces which we do not fully understand – and which now threaten to devour us.

And the old stories and the new stories alike remind us of a simple truth:

Only when we stop denying or fleeing from the Devourer and consciously turn to face it, do we discover the potential for something like initiation.

Or as Terrence McKenna once put it,

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer!

Quite so.

So what does it mean to be dreamt?

To the isolated, transcendent self – the one that believes itself to be above and outside the rest of nature – dreaming is a purely interior function. It only happens inside the mind of the dreamer. To such a self, the idea that a forest, river or ecosystem might dream, or that the earth has an imagination – let alone one that might find you - seems absurd.

Awakening from the lonely trance of this illusion – our partial beliefs and mental models, our over-identification with a sovereign self, and our sense of separation from the world and each other – allows us to perceive reality a little more clearly. To inhabit the mindset of deep connectedness that is surely the only resilient foundation for planetary flourishing.

Old growth minds. Old growth cultures. Old growth ecologies.

They all inhabit a shared dreaming.

An imagination disconnected from this deeper dreaming can be truly perilous. Terrifyingly adrift, but still adroit, it will conjure up clever things and find its way into fields of adjacent possibility – whether they are in service of life or not. We end up with technologies and philosophies that are clever but not necessarily wise. Our histories and mythologies repeatedly warn us about the risk of underestimating just how dangerous and depraved such an imagination can be.

It's easy to forget that the imagination is not simply a creative faculty of the human mind. As Haudenosaunee Elder Dan Longboat – one of the most gifted cross-cultural teachers I’ve ever heard speak - reminds us, the imagination is ecological in origin. And it is also how we remain permeable and connected to the deeper dreaming - to the sacred, to the sentience of the natural world and to the life-giving waters of the underworld. It’s how we find our way home – a home where time flows into thought, thought into spirit, spirit into place, place into culture.

We don’t just ‘have’ dreams. The dream is always flowing, like a wild subterranean stream of image and symbol. It doesn’t belong to us and it isn't just within us. We are just more aware of it in some states of consciousness than others.

Dreams are like the stars. Just because you can’t see them in the daylight doesn’t mean they aren’t still blazing across the sky.

The dreaming is always speaking to our waking selves. Sometimes it is very subtle. Other times it can startle the hell out of us. But for the most part we ignore it or misdiagnose it.

Let me take a chance here.

Sometimes I hear voices.

Saying that aloud feels a little risky. And rightly so. Starry-eyed prophets and stone-faced serial killers alike have voices in their head telling them to do things and the communities around them have to bear the consequences.

But I’ve learned to trust these voices. Once, on an early morning approach into an alpine climb in Austria, I saw a perfectly smooth rock seat and decided to take a quick rest. No sooner had I sat down, than I heard a voice say ‘move!’ At first I thought it was my climbing partner, and then perhaps my own voice chiding me for being lazy and I continued on my way. Seconds later, my perfect little seat was bombarded by a rockfall that would have undoubtably killed me.

I suppose I could describe them in other ways. The internal dialogue in my head. Pre-cognitive access to embodied knowledge. The deep imagination. The Muse. The whispers of the more-than-human world filtered through my own consciousness. Or maybe I just registered the anomalous smoothness of that rock seat and part of my brain simply figured out what had likely caused it and pulled the internal fire alarm.

Sometimes it comes as music. Once, after several days camping alone in Snowdonia as a youngster, I began to hear a stream of underground music that seemed to tumble down the slopes of the mountain. It flowed without cease for the whole day. I can still hear it when I tune in.

Òran Mór. The Great Song that fills Creation.

The best of our bards and buskers, our songsmiths and seanchaithe, our jam bands and jesters, our raptured poets and rappers, have always been able to hear it. Their imaginations dance with the imagination of the world. They let it flow through them and, shaped by their unique soulgift, it moves and touches the rest of us, reminding us that we are connected to something beyond ourselves.

But sometimes it’s just straight up voices.

It’s 1994 and I’m in Calgary fuelling up the car. I glance over to the next pump and I’m suddenly startled by a clear voice saying “You have to give that man something.”

That man is an older, well-dressed white guy with a full beard and spectacles filling up a Chevvy Suburban. In that moment I don’t question the voice or even think too much about what is happening. I just rummage around in the car looking for whatever it is I’m supposed to give him. My eye is caught by a plant root that someone had gifted me. I know it as bear root or Osha. Ligusticum canbyi for the taxonomically inclined after the American banker and botanist William Canby. Just west of town, in the language of the Îyârhe Nakoda people who revere it for its spiritual and healing properties, it’s called koîdukabi. Elder Catherine Powderface once spent a long afternoon helping me unpack and contextualize the meaning of the word though it’s not my place to write it down here. But she did say that for Nakoda people it’s worth more than gold.

I gaze at this dark, underworldly treasure and think to myself I’m definitely not giving him the bear root! And then I hear the voice again. “It’s the bear root. You have to give him the bear root.”

Damn!

Now comes the weird part.

I take the root and walk over to the man pumping his gas. “Sorry to bother you sir” I say. “But I’m supposed to give you this.” And I hand him the bear root. He looks at me in utter bewilderment and, to my surprise, begins to cry.

“Who told you to give me this?” he demands.

“It’s a little hard to explain” I reply truthfully.

And right there by the gas pumps, with tears streaming down his face, he tells me his story. “I’m on my way to Arizona to visit my sister who is terribly ill. A Nakoda medicine man said he’d give me a root that would help her. I waited for him, but he never showed up and now I have to get on the road.”

I guess mystery made sure that root got to him one way or another.

Whether you view this as the hand of the divine, the work of the spirits, the sentience of the medicine itself, a mysterious synchronicity, a random coincidence or just a bullshit anecdote will obviously depend on your particular worldview, culture, beliefs and life experience. For myself, I try not to be too dogmatic about explanatory causes; any opinion I hold is almost certainly going to be incomplete.

But I’m holding it at the forefront of my curiosity as I think about how to make the right move even when we have no idea what’s really going on. Because that’s nearly always true in complex domains where the stakes are high and where cause and effect are separated across time and space. Where not only do we not know what is truly going on but we can never know because it’s unknowable. We’re trying to make wise decisions and take skillful action as we participate in the moment. And all the while we’re entangled in these vastly complex webs of social and ecological relationships.

I’m certain that the decisions we make about complexity – where we try and view those complex webs from outside – are going to be qualitatively different than the decisions we make from complexity. From reciprocity and relatedness. From a mindset of connectedness.

From the deeper dreaming.

But however we understand it, hearing the prompts of that which lies beyond our everyday self – the trans-personal – is surely a perfectly ordinary human ability. We’ve all experienced moments of spontaneous intelligence that unfold without self-conscious thought getting in the way. It’s something beyond a flow state or a temporary down-regulation of the default node network. We somehow become available as the willing hands of mystery for a moment.

We’re accessible to the deeper dreaming and we let it have its way with us.

Some people – and I’m certainly not one of them – have the inherent nature or gift, the training and the cultural context whereby being the hands of mystery on behalf of their community is their full-time path of service.

I don’t envy them that gift.

It’s a funny thing. So many people these days seem to want some special individual access to such gifts. To become seers and shamans, oracles and visionaries. I’ve spent a chunk of my life around what we might call genuine ‘medicine people’. And for many of them, their gift has come with a price. Sometimes a truly terrible one. It demanded a sacrifice of them – their health, their sight, their freedom, the possibility of a ‘normal’ family life.

Their path of service to life demands that they dwell a little closer to death than most.

There’s a reason they live at the edge of the village. Especially in cultures that understand, honour and value such gifts.

Nobody asks the Baba Yaga to their Superbowl party!

For others, as the genius mythsinger Daniel Deardorff reminded us, it wasn’t until they embraced their own unique deformity as a sacred wound that they were able to fully discover and wield their gift. Deformity for Daniel represented the polar opposite of conformity; it’s our unique ‘strange limp’. It’s easy however to overly romanticize the true cost such limps can exact from us. It’s one thing to read ancient myths of the lame god Hephaestus: another altogether to read the utterly contemporary lived experience described with such clarity and uncommon grace by Sophie Strand.

Terrible beauty indeed.

It’s the same with vision. Many years ago, my PhD committee sent me on a course with the brilliant depth psychologist, developmental cartographer and eco-cultural insurgent Bill Plotkin that initiated a twenty-year friendship. True vision, I once heard Bill say, is invariably wounding. It has nothing whatsoever to do with that imagined life you collaged hopefully onto a ‘vision board’. It has very little to do with the legions of ‘vision-seekers’ who stumble into the liminoid margins of wilderness and psychedelia enacting ceremonies that end up reinforcing the very isolated western personae they sought to transcend. True vision not only shatters the defences of the well-armoured psyche; a single vision can rip a hole in the foundational paradigms of a deeply entrenched culture and let in the floodwaters of a much larger story.

I think I would nuance that to say that true vision is particularly wounding to the isolated self or when we and our cultures are misaligned with the deeper dreaming. When we start taking our sacred role as a simple node in a vastly complex living network too seriously. When our relationship to the world requires some form of disruptive re-alignment.

Again, our old stories and oral histories offer crystal clear guidance here. When we try and ‘get’ dreams, gifts, powers and visions with a graspy acquisitive mind, they have a way of not only slipping beyond our reach but humbling us in spectacular ways.

I recently wrote about the importance of staying grounded and listening to the land in this moment of hyper-complexity and cascading crisis.

But it’s much more than a one-way flow.

The wild world is alive. Animate. We all know this deep down. We are delighted when a wild raven answers our clumsy croaks. Enchanted when the dark eyes of a seal peer back at us with curiosity. Thrilling moments of perceptual reciprocity. And the more we learn, the more we discover that there is a continuous crackle of information flowing between all parts of the living world at all times. Everything is not only connected in some vaguely mysterious way to everything else. Everything seems to be talking to everything else.

All the time.

And – often unwittingly – we are talking back. We may be inwardly trembling with fear at the sound of every cracked twig and rustled leaf but we walk through the woods in a way that screams apex predator to the local inhabitants.

By their walk shall ye know them!

Animal-assisted therapists know this well. Horses will sense – and mirror back to us - the anxiety or excitement in our body movement. Dogs can smell our fear. Elk seem to know when they’re being hunted and tangled whales when they are being helped. As we learn to temper our own nervous system and somatic presence, we can modulate the messages we convey and pay attention to all kinds of new signals and channels. Like the shape-shifting healers of our ancestors, we can slip into the skin of badger or brook trout and notice how the world offers itself to our imaginations[ii] in new ways.

We can open up and hear what everybody around is saying.

But there’s more. As we come to understand more about the human nature connection, we learn that it is not just a living page of ciphered signals that we can learn to decode. It’s much more like a web of relationships. A conversation.

And what makes it a real conversation – rather than merely eavesdropping on the conversations of others – is that you talk back!

I am consistently amazed at what happens for modern people when they are given permission and a few simple guidelines to enter into a real, out loud conversation with the wild world. On countless occasions, people – who are often deeply skeptical about what they are being invited to do - have come back after a short time to share extraordinary stories and life-shifting insights that emerged when they spoke to the world as if it were fully sentient – and it answered back.

It turns out the properties of a living system depend on how we engage with it.

There’s listening.

There’s conversing.

And there’s participating and taking action in the way that only we can. Letting ourselves be moved. Letting life and the deeper dreaming flow through us. Risking impact. Dancing our own wildly unique and uncontrived dance as everything around us does the same.

And there’s no time like today to wake up from the trance and to dance your dance!

We need you. Just as you truly are.

With a bow of gratitude and wonder

Julian

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[i] Chaoplexic = chaos + complexity. It’s used to describe an emerging network-centric approach in military strategy, structure and tactics characterized by radical decentralization, self-organization, emergence, non-linear dynamics, self-synchronization and swarming. As small, inexpensive drones begin to change the face of modern warfare this concept is gaining increasing traction. Coming soon to a battlefield or cyberspace near you…

[ii] From Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese