February 4 2023
DREAMS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND.
When I was a toddler, my neighbourhood buddies called me a ‘dikkop’, a youngster whose head was too large. When I grew up, that ‘big-head’ anomaly disappeared.
Why this curious fact?
Well, it relates to my dreams. In 1992 I bought: “The Turning Point”, by Fritjof Capra, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He was well ahead of his time when, in 1982, he foresaw the conditions we face today, how in all fields, in healthcare, economics, ecology, our methods and theories are leading to our own demise.
I was especially intrigued by his analyses of the various schools of thought in psychoanalysis, by such men as Freud, Jung, Rogers, and others. He clearly exposed the Cartesian split between mind and body, and Descartes’ failure to integrate the various components of life. He also touched upon cosmic consciousness, including the ‘perinatal’ experiences involving the process of birth, ‘peri’ indicating the Greek ‘round about’ and ‘natal’ from the Latin ‘natus’ meaning ‘birth’
I was really struck when he mentioned something that applied to me: “in perinatal experiences the sensations and feelings may be relived in direct and realistic way….for example the experiences of enormous tensions characteristic of the struggles in the birth canal often accompanied by visions of titanic fights, destruction and self-destruction.”
That directly applies to me. It so happens that about 5-6 times a year I have violent dreams in which I physically fight enemies trying to destroy me, sometimes causing me to fall out of bed. I now know why I have these nightmares: they started at my birth.
There my weight was 5 kilogram, or 11 pounds, well above average. With an abnormally big head, my delivery from the womb was a real battle, a frantic struggle to be born.
That’s how I started my life: a desperate fight to live, now often re-enacted in my dreams. My unconscious mind at work, an experience that has put a stamp on my personality, always fighting injustice and perceived wrongs, such as ecclesiastical lethargy, climate indifference, capitalistic dominance, unhealthy eating habits.
O, yes. Another complication: the doctor at the home-birth, a friend of the family, noticed that my foreskin was too tight: so, since I was a robust boy, he immediately circumcised me, which, later in life, resulted in a pretty high pain-tolerance.
Body, Soul, Spirit.
All this brought me back to re-read Dr. C.A. van Peursen’s book, Body, Soul, Spirit, a survey of the body-mind problem. One of his conclusions was that, “One thing is clear. If the person is anything, he/she is above all a mystery which no amount of philosophizing, in itself, can ever exhaustively define.”
In the end, as a true philosopher, he concludes that, “Human existence is never lived out in the absence of intermediate factors: we ‘turn things over’, we hesitate, emphatize, evaluate – in short, we are conscious. All this means that the human as mind is the human as body.”
The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) goes even further. He wrote that ‘the soul is not in the body: the body is in the soul.” A true mystical statement.
Since my wife of 67 years died more than 2 years ago, my thoughts have repeatedly returned to our marriage, our 3 years of engagement – on August 31 1950 – and knowing her years before that as a family friend. She often appears in my dreams, mostly as a non-active personage. I frequently wonder how our relationship will be in eternity: no more marriage, Jesus told us.
I tend to think, in relationship to body/spirit, that, even though our bodies are asleep – Jesus never mentions death, always sleep – our ‘spirits’ are still alive.
I have given this a lot of thought, as for the first time I was directly confronted with death/spirit. My tentative conclusion, purely my own speculation, is that the period between physical ‘death’ (sleep, as Jesus put it) and the resurrection, however long or short this time is, allows the spirit to either prepare a person for eternal life in the new creation, or become a sort of hell, where the ‘deliberate sins’ are rehashed and revisited when life has been a direct refusal to honor the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
I constantly read that we are ‘religious’ persons. Romans 1: 20, clearly states that, examining creation can only lead to one conclusion: it is a miraculous, divine act of God. Bonhoeffer sees that, specific to the Christian faith, is the perception that God and creation are one. I concur.
I sincerely believe that Jesus died to restore Paradise, of which John 3: 16 gives the explanation: “God so loved the world that he offered his beloved Son to buy it back from the Evil one.” Promising eternity!