Essay

Mythic Imagination & Dream Reality: Between Two Thoughts -stephanie pope
 O (daughter) of noble family, meditate on your yidam and do not be distracted.
                                           Concentrate intensely on your yidam. Visualize (her) as an appearance without
                                           substance of its own, like the moon in water; do not visualize (her) as having
                                           solid form (Freemantle 38).

Leaning over my workspace one summer and while completing a mask-making project for a courseon myth and dream, I have a strange and rather frightening experience. In the dream I am working with, I have already experienced a dark figure with a sword who cuts off my head. I die, all goes dark, and then, presently, awareness returns. I see this figure throw what appears to be my head (it has blond hair where mine is red) as if he is discarding it as worthless. I see my headless torso still standing there. I am wondering where I am since I am present (aware) but present in neither head nor body. Through association and amplification methods that I learn during summer coursework on dream, I discover I am linking awareness to the image of the moon at its fullness. My sense of this image is what I am struggling to convey in the mask. (Oddly, this dream occurs one evening when in actuality a lunar eclipse in a full moon phase is taking place simultaneously with the dream.)

So, bending over my workspace that day, focusing consciousness on this image, and struggling to let this image speak, I begin to realize that the only materials appropriate to express this imagery will be those materials that can reflect it, materials such as a body of water, a mirror, or glass. I begin to visualize this, and when I do, a wave of panic overtakes me. The sudden, terrible fear seems almost paranoid---a defense against the experience itself.

Buddhism reveals the basic cause of all suffering to be the failure to recognize the true nature of existence. This failure Buddhism calls neither good nor evil, merely ignorance. When one experiences reality in ignorance, she is experiencing life from a false center. Life falsely centered is not real. This is what Buddhism means when it says that the world is unreal. The solution to this problem, according to Chögyam Trungpa, is to attain the insight of emptiness, or, in other words, to see through the illusion of reality. He comments, “Inseparable from emptiness is the luminosity---the presence of what is real, the basic ground in which the play of life takes place” (Tibetan, xvi). Catching sight of luminosity means the same thing as seeing through the ego-centered state of being that colors our habitual mode of consciousness, dissolving that sense of self in the light of reality. This moment in class that comes and vanishes in a flash may have been such a moment of seeing through.

According to Robert Avens, writing on the reality of the psyche in a work called Imaginal Body, Aristotle makes a distinction between two kinds of intellect, one passive and the other active. The passive intellect Aristotle terms the intellectus possibilis or reasoning power. The other, active, nous poietikos or poetic intellect, is a kind of “twilight consciousness”. Avens writes of the poetic intellect that it “is an agency that permeates the potential phantasms of the soul with its spiritual light and awakens their sleeping, secretly tense and vigilant intelligibility” (37). Further, he indicates that Marie-Louise von Franz suggests that this agent intellect can be likened to the Tao in Chinese philosophy and is equivalent in meaning to Jung’s psychological idea of the luminosity of unconscious archetypal content which “possesses its own reality and shines in its own light” (38). From Jung, then, psyche is understood as identical with its images through which from their subtle substance we create our reality (33). Based on these ideas, I am now thinking of the poetic, mythic images as awakened images that story a life bringing it alive to its richer nature of deeper psyche. This deeper psyche, deeper in Hillman’s sense of that thought, speaks to depth as the primary metaphor of psyche expressing “interiority” and thus, pointing to psyche’s fundamental relation to the realm of images, the realm of the dead (Archetypal 38-39). This deeper psyche does not consist of images. It is image (Avens 39). 

The Bardo Thödol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, is ‘a Book of Liberation through Hearing (thödol) on the After-Death Plane (bardo)’ (Mythic 392). Because this text is usually associated with life after death in its presentation and use as a guide for the dying and the dead, it is not often considered in the light of a peak experience of any given moment, a moment such as mine in class (Trungpa 3). The basic idea of bardo, “bar” meaning in between, and “do” meaning island or mark, refers to that which stands between two things and represents that space or gap between what has just occurred which is not yet understood, and the moment it is about to be transformed into a wisdom of understanding (Freemantle 10-11). Suspicious of that brief moment in class as an intangible kind of experience of luminosity, I continue to struggle to understand it. This struggle for understanding is greatly aided by a journal entry Joseph Campbell makes during his 1954 journey to India questing for further understandings of transcendental realities. He writes

I have been reading the second booklet of Sri Krishna Menon, Atma-Nirvriti (Freedom and Felicity in the Self) and I find in it, besides a good, clear statement of the Vedantic idea of the world as pure consciousness, the following well-stated formula: “In between thoughts and in the deep-sleep state shines that principle to which the word ‘I’ points…. When the mind is directed to it, it changes into that, losing the characteristics of mind…. A sage knows well that consciousness is self-luminous and that it is consciousness that illumines the entire world. He knows also that his real nature is consciousness and experience and cannot as such be known or experienced (243).

Campbell understands that he is in contact here with the atman-Brahman concept, for Sri Krishna Menon teaches “We are in our true state (atman) every night in sleep, but also during the period of waking consciousness every time we are ‘between two thoughts’ (244).

It is from understandings acquired in his meeting with this sage concerning the three states of waking, dream, and the deep sleep state of pure consciousness (which is peace) that Campbell later teaches the doctrine, taken from the Mandukya Upanishads of “A-U-M” (OM). AUM refers to all possible states of consciousness. This idea can be applied as a practice in meditation on the breath. This practice of meditation on the breath through the sound syllables Ah-Oo-Mm, and then the silence out of which the sounds arise and back into which these same sounds decay, seems to be a practice of liberation, also, through hearing.

It is curious that the question this teacher poses for Campbell to consider is none other than this one: “Where are you between two thoughts?” “He gave me a little meditation,” Campbell writes. “Where are you between two thoughts? That is to say you are thinking all the time and you have an image of yourself. Do you ever have a glimpse beyond your thinking of anything you can think about yourself?” (303). That glimpse, if you have it, is of that reality out of which all your thoughts flow.

The Tibetan model of the body-mind complex relies on a schema involving three levels. The first level of gross body is the body of flesh, blood, and bone, which further comprises the five main elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and space. The corresponding gross mind is the mind of the six sense-consciousnesses. These are the five physical senses and a sixth that operates within the central nervous system in a coordinating manner that links input from our five senses to our wants, thoughts, ideas, and images (Thurman 35).

The second level of subtle body somewhat corresponds to the central nervous system in that it is the pattern that structures the actual brain-matter input of the central nervous system into a body of experience. The subtle body will not be found in the operating room of any hospital. This subtle system of nerve channels is a structure of energy pathways linking seven nexi (thought of as wheels, complexes, or lotuses) up the spine. This subtle spine is a three channel central axis running from midbrow to genitals. Within this subtle body “drops” of awareness are moved by subtle energies called winds up and down the central axis via the brain-crown and the base of the spine (Thurman 36).

The yoga psychology of Kundalini operates out of this idea.

The subtle mind that corresponds here consists of three interior states that emerge the moment subjective energy is turned inward and withdrawn from gross senses. These three states I think of as grades of a single experience Trungpa is calling the insight into emptiness or luminosity. These three grades of the experience of luminosity are called luminance, radiance, and immanence or deepest state of subtle mind. They can be likened by way of image to pure moonlight, pure sunlight, and pure darkness. Thurman writes that these three states are normally mixed with the unconscious drive patterns, patterns that include desires, aggressions, and confusions in unenlightened persons (36).

The third level of subtle body is thought of as the extremely subtle body and known as the indestructible drop. The tiniest of energy patterns, the indestructible drop exists normally in the center of the heart lotus (wheel, chakra, complex). Its corresponding extremely subtle mind state is an intuition of clear light called transparency. Coming to this level, awareness will abandon the mind-body dualism leaving both joined as one. This experience is the deepest seat of awareness of the Buddhist soul. In continuity it is indestructible even though in flux from life to life. Achieving this level of awareness is the same as attaining Buddhahood. This is the underlying goal of the Bardol Thödol (Thurman 36).

Somehow, while working on my dream mask this summer, a shift in consciousness occurs for me. The severed dream head becomes identified with the subtle substance of moon image during the mask creation project. And, I am suddenly aware of it. This awareness does not come in the form of any kind of thinking about things. I experience this realness and, then, know it from that. The two things become as one. They are one as in a new creation expressing some new recognition of a deathless identity upon which the waking and dream thinking plays.

The language, “some new recognition of a deathless identity”, is a quote from the process paper I write in relation to the dream and myth course. The full moon symbolism may represent integration into the Tibetan Bardo world of death. This integration, Hillman says, expresses an attitude of the soul that does not have praxis in the dayworld sense but, rather, honors the perspective within the image (Dream and Underworld 142, 160). What this means to me is that the moon speaks to a perspective in the bardo realm through which my consciousness is being opened up, and this, perhaps, offers the possibility of a new viewpoint. Hillman says, “Sometimes spontaneous images of roundness brings a healing beyond paranoid defensiveness…. The individual free soul moves into a perspective of cosmic necessity” (Dream 162).

Now, curiously, this moon imagery of mine that reenacts the mystery myth of the two that become one coincides in statement with Aristotle’s nous poietikos as active agency of mind. Further, it embraces von Franz’s notion that likens this agent intellect to the Tao of Chinese philosophy in as much as the two that become one, become also many. It is also natural to suppose that that which becomes many may also, from time to time, return to the one. And, just as this is at work here and now in the microcosm of my being and becoming, it is at work in the universe everywhere.

Campbell writes that this Tao of Chinese philosophy has its Indian equivalent in the Sanskrit term dharma. From the root dhr dharma refers to the order that supports the universe. Campbell writes

As the Tao Te Ching has said of the tao, so say the Indians of dharma: its yonder
side is beyond definition; its hither side is the mother, support, and bearer of all
things. The Chinese diagram symbolic of the tao represents geometrically an
interplay of two principles: the yang, the light, masculine or active, hot, dry,
beneficent, positive principle; and its opposite, the yin, dark, femine, passive,
cold, moist, malignant, and negative. They are enclosed in a circle of which each
occupies half, representing the moment (which is forever) when they generate the
ten thousand things….In the Sung period {1127-1279 A.D.} this diagram was
considered to be a sign of the phases of the moon (Oriental, 24).

The yin-yang, over-and-under symbol just now described has in counterdistinction a second symbol representative of the unnamed and ineffable originating source of this said structuring principle. It is represented as a simple circle and refers to the two in name who are one in source as the Great Mystery. And Campbell, in going on to speak of this secret suchness of all things that remains even now in the gateway of our second millennium as yet the darkest mystery, quotes in the Tao Te Ching: “And of the Mystery the yet darker Mystery is the portal of all secret essences” (Oriental, 25).

In The Way of the Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo three distinct stages are discerned. The potential for recognition of the primary clear light and/or that potential for recognition of the secondary clear light occur during the first of these stages, the Chikhai Bardo stage. This is the bardo of the moment before death (Mythic 394-96). If luminosity of the primary clear light goes unrecognized but then is recognized during the experience of the secondary clear light, liberation is attained. Freemantle writes that male and female dharmatas meet and karma is overcome. She says “Just as the light of the sun overcomes darkness, so the power of karma is overcome by luminosity of the path, and liberation is attained. This, which is called the second bardo, flashes before the mental body, and the consciousness is able to hear again just as before” (39). This describes accurately my dream experience of death. Had I understood what I was experiencing in that moment, I may have experienced liberation.

I understand there is a visualization practice one can apply using an image, a yidam that corresponds in characteristics to one’s innate enlightened nature. If this is one’s way, one could place this yidam in one’s mind in meditation. For in the moment after death, even the lama aids the dead one by reading a description of the yidam. The lama will then follow this with these words:

It is apparent to me now that the dream initiation I identify as the first bardo experience of the luminosity of the clear light is followed by the experience of the pure illusory body of the secondary clear light in the rather frightening experience of that moment in class. Had I understood then, had I a yidam to place over that situation so as to hold concentration, I may not have slipped back into the confused projections of karma belonging to the luminosity of the third bardo of dharmata. Yet, in this loss, the active agent, the poetic intellect, has left its signature where that throng of nothing uniform pressed down. Therefore, sharing now this imprint of a self-radiance, and knowing it to be of that principle to which the term “I” points, I know further that I risk sharing. For having returned from between two thoughts, I know, more than ever, how all words mislead.

Works Cited

Avens, Robert. Imaginal Body: Para-Jungian Reflections on Soul, Imagination and Death. Washington D.C.: University Press of
       America, Inc., 1982.

Campbell, Joseph. Baksheesh and Brahman: Indian Journal 1954-1955. Eds. Robin and Stephen Larsen & Antony Van
       Couvering. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1960.

----The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. New York: Penguin Books, 1962.

----The Mythic Image. New Jersey: Princinton University Press Bollingen Series C, 1990.

Hillman, James. Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Connecticut: Spring Publications, Inc., 1997.

----The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,1979.

Padma Sambhava. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Trans. Robert A. F. Thurman. New York: Bantam Books,1994.

Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo. Trans. Francesca Freemantle and Chogyam
      Trungpa. Massachusetts Random House, Shambhala Classics, 2000.

Trungpa, Chogyam, Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos. Ed. Judith L. Lief. Massachusetts: Random
       House, Shambhala, 1992.