Within days of viewing THE EDGE OF DREAMING with her Mind Linguistic class, Dr. Barbara Condron posted the following to Amy Hardie at POV.
Amy, your film is timely and forthright and the discussion here helpful for everyone. Thank you for inviting dialogue about "what did you see that I didn't see?"
I can speak from having consciously explored Mind since the mid 1970s. My study began with personal experiences ranging from a nightmare at age 6 to telepathy at 9, perceiving auras at 15, and out of body experiences at 20. By providence at 22, I began studying at a branch of the School of Metaphysics (SOM) in the town where I had just graduated from university. At first, I studied at SOM not to produce experiences in consciousness, rather to understand the Mind experiences that had always been with me.
At SOM, I learned a series of progressive daily practices in concentration, meditation, and visualization. These produced awareness in the inner levels of consciousness where dreaming and other extrasensory experiences occur. Because I am not one to dismiss discovery with the idea that "no one knows why", I have continued with the 501(c)(3) educational institute as a teacher and researcher ever since finding it to be a suitable conduit for meeting outstanding professional and lay people in diverse areas of human endeavor, people like yourself. I believe and I know from experience that we have the capacity to use and develop the Minds we possess. This is, in brief, the background from which I speak.
From this metaphysical point of view, what I can reflect is the inner truth that each of your dreams hold a message for you about you. They are personal to you and universal in their presentation of symbology. At SOM, a basic principle of dreaming we teach is that every dream is about the dreamer. It tells us about the conscious state of our awareness. It is your dream about you, even if and when it may involve experiencing with others, as in visitation dreams, perhaps like your dream with Arthur.
Do your dreams warn you of the illness building in your body? Perhaps. It is just as likely your reaction to your dreams - taking them to heart as you did - allowed for a degree of self-fulfilling prophecy as well. Considering the death theme of your dreams, the changes in your life became apparent even through the shamanic journey. When it appears in a dream, death will always point to an area of change for the dreamer. This is a universal theme that is neutral, neither positive or negative, "only thinking makes it so" as Shakespeare said and Guatama the Buddha described so eloquently 2000 years before him.
As you said, "I don't believe a dream can kill you." I don't believe it either. That doesn't mean it hasn't or can't happen. Many people have died "in their sleep" afterall! However, irony aside, in a figurative sense your dreams did kill you. You are a different person than before the dreams came. It is your response to them that has fashioned the change - the "little death" that is our sleep.
Homo sapiens receive dreams then reflect upon the universal elements that comprise them. This imagery is one area of my research. We are an evolving species, neuroscience tells us this, as you are aware. Our exploration is of Mind more than the brain. It comes from a place of inner integrity, the vast reaches of consciousness as it enters into a single, self-aware form called an individual. Just like all the thoughts that could be funneled down into one sentence, or one dream.
What we understand is that each dream is unique to the dreamer and its message can only be fully realized by its creator. We have also found there to be a Universal Language used by thinkers for communication. (A book I recommend on the big picture of universal symbology is Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey by Kelly Bulkeley) This language has evolved over time and space as the species has developed. It is a picture language that can be interpreted and understood by anyone who knows the language. This is the language the Mind speaks, not the brain.
Your dreams led you to question, to open your mind. They encouraged you to explore consciousness beyond the body. You began to consider the consciousness of self that lives on after the body falls away. It is the same as consciousness existing before birth. Now enter the Tibetan Dream Yogas and the Aboriginal dreamtime. It is the same consciousness that allowed the one you once knew as Arthur to speak to you. Had that never happened, and had you failed to remember the encounter, where would all of us be?
Part of what I see is the enormous influence you are having at a time when the people of our world are awakening beyond the prison of our five physical senses and into the inner worlds of our dreams. Noted authority from Saybrook Institute, Dr. Stanley Krippner's keynote at the 2009 IASD conference captured the essence you have found – "Everyone who Dreams Partakes of Shamanism".
Barbara Condron
School of Metaphysics (USA)
www.som.org
www.dreamschool.org
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