The patient, who also appears in my essays “Venice Beach” and “The Old Man Again”, is a man of elder years. He was born in a Mid-western city. He has had a successful career over many decades. Now he is old and plagued by physical problems which, luckily, are not life threatening but exceedingly annoying and about which he complains endlessly. He came because he knew that I, being old, would understand his complaints, indeed his fear. Could I help him with that? I thought we should try. So this patient is not about early anxieties or about current relationships. This work is not about his successes in life of which he has had no small measure.

The patient begins……

Patient: I have been thinking.

Dr. B: About what?

Patient: For one, I am still here and I wonder why since my fear about dying has left me.

Dr. B: Do you know why?

Patient: I think I was really afraid of being alone. I brooded. I saw nothing useful in life and I was obviously much past the middle arch of my life. You know, I'm old. Before then I was a doer, a creator, and an enabler, a vehicle for myself and others to go forth and do their stuff whatever it was. So I was afraid. I had aches. I didn't feel right in my head. I would wake up at night and think. I had no dreams to fulfill and women, of course, were not on the table. When young, there is that excitement. It was a most intense loneliness that brought me here, a loneliness that emptied my world, internal as you say, but also external. I suppose it's true when you shut down internally it can be constricting externally or you can make your external world small, dark and bleak a replica of the internal.

I did not know this before coming here. People do not know what or how to think about such things. No one ever teaches you. No one ever says, "you better get acquainted with yourself" or if they do, no one says how. We are too busy with our work, our loves, our families to think too far into the future and all of this you taught me. I was thinking in a ruminative manner and I had a dream that really puzzled me. This is it....

DREAM #1

A scene is of black people. A young woman was fitted with a parachute and pushed out of a plane. The parachute did not open but she was not filled. I see that other women are busy taking care of her.

I see a tall, long-legged black man with new trousers fitted perfectly. I think he must have had them made by a fine custom tailor. He puts on new shoes of a beautiful color, which I cannot name because I had never seen this color before. There are a small group of retainers near by for he is naked above the waist. They have the clothes he will put on.

Dream #2

Now I see a train slowing down. The train is massive, strong. It is also a person shaking nine times. Is it just slowing or is it coming into the station? I could see the platform.

Dr. B: I see what you mean. Let us see what we can do with it.

Patient: But I am not through yet with what I was thinking. You know I have a lot of time and I read a lot and think a lot and a lot about my childhood.

Dr. B: What did you think about your childhood?

Patient: I remembered and I keep remembering the dream I had when I was nine or ten. I call it my falling dream. In that dream I was in the sky and I kept falling and falling and falling. It was terrifying. I don't know now whether I woke or whether I just remembered it on waking. In the morning I told my mother about the dream. She stopped what she was doing. She listened and said, "Don't worry, you will grow out of it." I think I must have grown into it. So in a sense the dream I had about the woman falling was not unfamiliar to me.

Dr. B: It seems then you know these kinds of feelings quite well. And what else?

Patient: I was thinking of what a sorry state the world is in, as we have talked about before, and it came to me that the world has been in a sorry state for a very long time. It is as if the disparate events, the disparate parts of the world, each with its sorry history came together the way shuffling a deck of cards, you know unified and smaller and manageable. I could see the corruption from the very beginning of time in each civilization, some lasted a long time and some a short time, lies, power and greed around the world. Corruption began and everything very early was corrupted - the governments, churches, schools. False beliefs were circulated, animosities were stirred, not a thousand years ago but for thousands of years.

When I looked at our United States, it is the same only more so. Maybe because the rot has begun to weaken the structures and then the phony wars, special military forces and by the way I think those private armies who run wild and run their own army paid for by the U.S. are there to protect the bigwigs when civil disobedience begins to become prominent. They are the mercenaries who will kill the citizens who are outraged by the obscenities practiced and lied about.

There is our Congress. It seems to me their only function is to make laws so the big guys can cheat lawfully. It is always a question of how much. After all the big guys give them the money to provide them with respectability, as when things blow up as they have recently in the money market.

There is outrage in Congress and feigned surprise, much like Claude Rains in "Casablanca" except Congress is not as good an actor as Rains. When I think of this I am very saddened at what human beings have done to this beautiful world everywhere. I get silly, I cry. So where did we go wrong several thousand years ago and how?

Dr. B: OK, I understand what you are saying and you know I agree with you. So what about the dreams?

Patient: I don't know how to think about it. I was confused when I woke. I thought it was not possible. So I read somewhere about an American flyer falling from great heights, his parachute not opening but he survived. When I think of that I shiver. I have a terrible feeling in my chest. I feel I know what that woman is feeling as she is falling. Can't you feel a shiver yourself? After all you jumped out of an airplane two times. You should know. After she fell I could see that she was being attended by several women. She had survived but apparently was hurt in some way.

I had the transient idea of these two people being black. Maybe this dream is some revelation about man's beginning in Africa. Isn't that where it all began for man? I could see the metaphor here as the first people put on earth, a man and a woman, though there were others to help them. I don't know about their origin. I am afraid I cannot go far in this. It is entirely out of my experience. This is all I have about the dream. It is something deep in my unconscious of which I have never had any conscious knowledge.

Dr. B: Let us consider the male, the logical state that brings the cognitive state of each soul into existence and the unconscious, the woman, that allows automatic vibrations to penetrate the consciousness of the person.

You know that the unconscious has layers which are called, for example, one of personal experiences brought from incarnations, and the personal experience of a lifetime but the greater striation is that part of the spirit remembering Source Center. What you are watching in your dream are different levels of the unconscious and different levels of spirit consciousness that supports the concretetization of the soul and all the plans that are to take shape in a given lifetime.

Let us consider the family and how it relates. The soul has a plan for living, existing and exploring and experiencing throughout a lifetime. In that patterning what helps them are their parents. They help the weaving of the intention of the soul, the pattern of feeling, thinking and acting. The family is a matrix in which this occurs and, in that sense, everybody is a matrix for the soul. Moreover the "soul is a humanizing factor in every human being".

Patient: That is a lot to think about, maybe too much. I seem to be ruminating about all the bad stuff going on and realizing it has been so for a long time. I know I am not answering or talking to your reasonable explanation but I want to tell you I had a new realization while I was walking on the beach the other morning. I was thinking of those guys who want no regulation on Wall Street or really anywhere and no regulation by government at all. That is why they want a small government. They want a wild west scenario, no law. The bandits do whatever they want. It is really so today in the financial sector or globally. The bandits do what they want. Suddenly I thought about the pagans who worshipped many gods or none if they were so inclined. And then these Jews come along and say there is only one God. I think the pagans feel the restriction. The Jews say what you do is not without consequence. The pagans don't like that and that is the heart and the beginning of anti-semitism a never ending fire of hatred of Jews who put a damper on those guys doing whatever they wanted and never having a thought about it. The crooks on Wall Street are descendants of those pagans. We need some genetic testing. Maybe it would reveal more Neanderthals amongst us, more than we thought we had.

Dr. B: (Laughing) I like your idea and maybe you are right. It is as good an explanation for its continued life in the world today and lends itself to any unscrupulous deal. But let me say a word about your dream of the train.

I think as a prelude your dreams are taking you beyond the mundane realities you have known for a very long time. The train represents a new form of living, a new world vibration. The train coming into the station, a place where people get off and begin the activities of life, coming off is the new energy emerging from the train is to emerge from the unconscious so there is a new good for all people. This part of the dream corresponds to the shoes of unnamable color because we do not yet have a name for the foundation that will emerge in the future and you remember nine is the number of the hermit in the tarot. He is the person who has climbed the mountain successfully and sees all. This future you are dreaming of will be a generation that will see much if not all.

It would seem your dream is an answer to your thinking and feeling badly as your imagination surveys this wide, sad world and maybe because you are feeling this sadness you are favored to be given this wonderful dream. Thinking about your soliloquy I think this answer infers that there will be a diminishing of the imprint which lies more or less heavy in each of us and about which we lie to ourselves and are unknowingly twisting our character with further lying, therefore further accident and misfortune.

Patient: Anyway tell me how does what you say affect me? Suppose I buy what you say?

Dr. B: What I am saying about the dream buys you peace of mind through

knowledge. Every human being at some time asks himself, "Who am I and what is my purpose in life?" and, within that questioning, there is a deeper feeling that there must be something important about them. That feeling is a soul. So if we suppose that every human being had a conscious intention to be born, the tendency of the soul is not material. It is an ethereal vibration. Its matrix integrating into matter must have support. What does that mean? The matrix is the intention of the mother and the father to conceive so that families can accept a child or not accept it. Nonacceptance is also a soul intention to learn. The man and woman in your dream are there as symbols of the ethereal, but there to reveal their essence for you.

Patient: Well, all of this is pretty deep or pretty something but I do get a sense of what you are saying.

Dr. B: I think what you are dreaming and what I say about it is directly bearing on your sadness, your anger and your feeling of helplessness about these enormous transgressions of human decency. I think you are being reminded that whatever the pagans think about what they do and even if they go to church, mosque or temple and mindful go through the motions, it doesn't count for anything. Your dream says there is a greater and deeper knowing and that accounts are in existence and there may be stiff and painful learning for them to do. In the meantime even if you alone dream like this and grapple with this it is worthwhile and important for all of us for your unconscious vibrations go out into the mass consciousness. It does make a mark. After all it is as if something very deep in your unconscious is giving you a message of hope that remembers the eternal quality of life. This one has been a flicker. There will be others, for the soul being part of Source, is eternal. It is the deepest layer of your unconscious, the one that connects with Source that is giving you this dream for you in your sadness recognize how far we have moved away.

COMMENTARY

Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a manifesto at the end of the 18th century that declared poetry ought to be lyrical and romantic and the language of poetry be that of the common man. And so it was.

In Germany, mid 1850, Marx and Engels wrote the communism manifesto, a political work of still great importance. Man was beginning to pay a lot of attention to man.

In France this lyricism expounded by Wordsworth and Coleridge took the form of painting - the impressionism movement.

It was all about feeling.

One would have to assume this great movement that spread out was an evolution of consciousness and a great movement forward in the history of man.

In another fifty years Freud would publish his interpretation of dreams, an attention paid to the inner life of man and a way to access it. Obviously this evolution is still going on hindered by forces that do not want change - the outer reality mirrors the inner one.

Getting old doesn't always only bring thoughts and fears of dying. Old, sick people have narrowed horizons - themselves - and the particular parts of them that do no work. They are their own focus with little left for anyone or anything else. But all old people are not like this. Many are well and knowing. Their finite years are, sort of speak, immediate. They have great intuitions about what is to come.

One may think of salmon who, despite formidable obstacles, go upstream back to where they were born and the wild beasts and flocks of birds who make yearly pilgrimages, by what mean not yet know but uncannily accurate.

And the penguins to return and in returning insure another generation. The elephants and do we know about the whales. So it has been for thousands of years.

And man, too, when he approaches that time, must go back to the beginning. Here it is obvious that the body is the matrix that contains an ethereal essence - the soul - and when the body falls away the ethereal essence, in that instant, recalls its intention on birthing. This is why people seem at that last breath to be accepting of God. That is true. It is not so much the acceptance of any theology of any church. These souls are accepting a joyous return to Source Center.

And should all of us hold this thought as we age and we should not fear that rubicon, for we fall into reunion.

There are people who at an advanced age have these marvelous intuitions. It is with this preamble that I present a poem by William Wordsworth, written a little over two hundred years ago, a poem I read seventy years ago, "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality".

You will see what this great poet of the 19th century intuited about these matters. I have put in italics parts of the poem which seem to be identical with the patients dream and my understanding of it.

Our explanation may not be as thrilling as the poets work. His account was dictated by his great muse and ours in plodding prose attempting to make clear the mysteries of all time.

It is what we are impelling to do. It is Source Center that constantly prods us.

Find ME.

Ode to Intimations of Immortality by Williams Wordsworth (written 1803-6)

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;--

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

III

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May

Doth every Beast keep holiday;--

Thou Child of Joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

                    Shepherd-boy!

IV

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.

Oh evil day! if I were sullen

While Earth herself is adorning,

This sweet May-morning,

And the Children are culling

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,

And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

--But there's a Tree, of many, one,

A single Field which I have looked upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone:

The Pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

VI

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

And, even with something of a Mother's mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,

Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,

And unto this he frames his song:

Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little Actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That Life brings with her in her equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.

                                  VIII

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,

A Presence which is not to be put by;

To whom the grave

Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight

Of day or the warm light

A place of thought where we in waiting lie.

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest--

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realised,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:

But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

And let the young Lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day

Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now forever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

May 2010