Tag: dreamtime

“Spiritual” Journeys

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have used inverted commas quotation mark here because I struggle a little with how words have in a sense become tainted by multiple usage and being bandied about as PR. Spiritual as a word has had its impact and meaning downgraded to the point of near meaninglessness.

I am going to attempt to put into words something which I have hesitated to do. It is close to impossible. This cannot be undertaken without emphasising just how important a few years of my childhood were in my development, in this life. One constellation in particular left its mark deep in my psyche.

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It was by its light during an English language common entrance exam that I foresaw events near two and a half decades later. It was the harbinger and the key of a volte face in life. I left the harbour alone in my coracle adrift upon the Southern ocean lit by its solace. I left Cape Town after being burned on table mountain.

Later I had another foreboding which was also to find consummation over a similar time delay. Each of these were pivotal. That foreboding prevented me making a UCAS university choice against the advice of my school teachers.

When I was young and in an English boarding school as an expat child I got to read the lessons and the prayers in church. While the others sat with parents. It was like a duck to water that I took to the lectern and the prayer “chair” deep in the nave. There I found St Francis of Assisi.

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« Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.
Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l’amour. »

« C’est en pardonnant qu’on est pardonné,
c’est en mourant qu’on ressuscite à l’éternelle vie. »

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This man was in tune with the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal. His words touched.

Unfortunately those with the skill of a chameleon can adopt any mask, any direction, any character they choose. Believe me I learned how to blend. And in blending one loses authentic essence.

At the end of my schooling I took general studies courses in Buddhism, cooking and Rastafarianism. Ever Jah, ever loving, ever faithful. Rastafari. I read all that I could on witchcraft and alchemy. I made “friends” with the librarian in our town.

The Buddhism was presented in an intellectual descriptive manner in which the various fetters were enumerated for debate. Although I understood, the manner was for me boring and definitional. I sensed beyond that which was being professed. It was during intense meditation sat in seiza at karate that I learned that I had in fact been meditating all of my childhood. I used to sit and observe. I used to wait. I was touched directly by the dreamtime out in the shimmering bush of western Queensland. The aboriginal pointing stick had cleaved something open.

And then when I went to university I mostly forgot. By the time I was doing my Ph.D. research I figured that I had found something I was good at. So maybe this was the future. I enjoyed “pissing about with lasers”. I was to an extent, life and soul of the party. It was only in the early nineties that I started to withdraw, as if driven by a deeper current, out into the hills, the mountains and the countryside. It set up a kind of imbalance. On the one hand was a “normal” life and career. On the other there was silence and quiet. My reading was more intellectual philosophy, science and philosophy of science. I noted that despite mundane academic achievement many of “the greats” struggled with non-salary paying bigger questions.

I was offered a choice. Fort Collins Colorado or Bern Switzerland. One of those would have brought me quicker into contact with things “spiritual” than the other. The Swiss francs were certain, so I saw the Berner Oberland and learned painfully of “qualität”. Something which I tried thenceforth to express.

In the mid nineties at the place of my prior foreboding I was brought to my knees. Despite writing excellent research proposals I was stymied and unfunded. A grudge held by a “competing” senior academic could kill a proposal with a mere word. I had a breakdown. The answer to life the universe and everything could no longer be found in the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. It seemed there was more. It was around then that my ambition faded and the picture of a life academic dimmed. I began to search in earnest. I opened myself up wide. Again I largely forgot and tried to rebuild a life after breakdown. For some unknown reason money for research and start-up came more easily. I was “successful” for a while.

In the very early part of this century I was tested by power. I had a taste of it and did not abuse. Like Galadriel I refused the ring and was no longer sorely tempted thereby. It was around this time that a series of what might be called micro-renunciations began. In which step-wise I renounced or was forced to renounce the accoutrements of normal life. Each one was more difficult and profound than the last. Slowly life was stripped of all that made it busy and hectic. Until in the middle of 2006 I renounced all and walked off into the metaphorical “wilderness”. Dramatic as that sounds, at face value it looked simple, at core it cleaved and parted, severed and up-ended.

I did not become a wandering mendicant with charnel grounds for abode nor skull cup for beverage. Though adrift I most certainly was. I had already learned as a child, the nature of impermanence. Strangely without accoutrement life did not cease, the world did not implode, nor did it stop.

When you are thrust  from an Outlook calendar ruled life, with hours dissected into segments, with meetings set for you, with each action seemingly accountable, into nothing. The meaning of time changes in an unalterable and irrevocable way. It is no longer a spreadsheet thing. The boxes, the rice paper walls of the day, dissolve.

At end of 2008 I left the map so to speak. I began a series of meditations which went beyond. There was nothing, despite my research skill, which I could find written. These “meditations” continued in the UK in houses close to civilisation yet separate in the English countryside. I can say that the rigor of these was high and they continued for many years. In around 2010-11 I began having Buddhist dreams.

In the early part of the century whilst still teaching physical chemistry I had a series of waking visions in which I had “om mane padme hum” tattooed on my forearms in Sanskrit and with me in monastic robes. These visions were sufficiently powerful to be present whilst I was lecturing Chemical Reaction Kinetics to undergraduates in South Kensington. It was around then that I got to express my compassion for others, to care for them.

Overlaid on a “Toltec” background was a distinctly Buddhist vibe.

All the while I had a seemingly normal life as a married man doing for quite a while “A” level science private tutoring. The outer world and the inner world differed and markedly so.

To me as a member of the elephant dreaming class there is no problem with the scholastic wisdom teachings of Siddartha and the more dramatic Toltec corpus. The latter is a guide, when viewed with clarity, to the navigation of glamour and illusion. There is probably only one truth expressed via many different approaches. The Tower of Babel has a lot to answer for…

This is probably enough for today…

Rain Forest – Dreamtime – Barramundi Dream 21-09-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here is this morning’s “nice” dream. I thought at last a dream with no politics or intrigue in.

The dream opens with a small convoy of three or four Land Rovers leaving a bitumen road and heading off down a dirt track. The cars have cargo rails on top and are laden for expedition. I am driving the rear car. We head down a track into an increasingly dense rain forest. The wet dust becomes more muddy. We reach a car-park staging post and must yomp to the residence huts. We load up with as much as we can carry. Leaving more stuff for future retrieval. We have enough to set up for the night and a few days. But we will be here for weeks so there will be more trips needed.

The footpath is pretty good but needs clearing on occasion. We approach a small compound which looks like a scout hut / ex-military training facility. It is arranged around a quadrangle. It is sometimes used for team building purposes. Because we are relatively few in number we will bed down in the main hut which has bunks for us all. There are several floor to ceiling curtain divides to make rooms. The last users have not tidied up after themselves. I put my pack down in the end “room” and a very young Pierot takes the bunk next to mine. The party is all young, twenties and thirties. They are students on an archaeological dig from university. The woman in charge is a slight small white woman of mid-thirties with freckles and light brown hair. It is her dig. They all want to go and see the dig site before dark. I stay at base making it ship shape and Bristol fashion as is my want. I make the beds and check the mosquito nets. I reattach the curtains. I put two pots of stew on to cook, one veggie one meat. I check the supplies.

They all come back excited from the dig site and Pierot wants to take a group photo which he does. In the creek below we can see serval canoes filled with Australian army “diggers” they have exited on the river out of a cave system and are proceeding downstream on a training exercise. Because of the state of the world the military is on alert. In a cliff on the other side of the creek I can see a command and control post cut out of the cliff. There are a couple of officer types in there.

The gang gather for food and I take the woman lead to one side. Her hair has gotten frizzy from the intense humidity of the place. I tell her that I used to do team training events like for UK GRAD. I organised these. I say that I am happy to organise the logistics of the stay. It is for her to say what she wants. She is very happy for me to do this. I am much older than everyone else. In one sense I am my current biological age and in an other many thousands of years old. It is because I am there that the aboriginal elders have allowed access to the dreamtime site which they are going to explore. This is because I am dreamtime too. Night falls suddenly, we eat and retire.

The next morning we all head down the trail to the dig site under the rainforest canopy. The sounds of the jungle are magnificent. We reach a descent through red-brown mud arches made out of dirt which look like we are going through an earth ribcage. The pillars on either side are a bit reminiscent of huge termite mounds.  I am completely at home here. The feeling is mysterious, dank and damp.  There is a kind of portent to the structure. The “rib cage” extends for a hundred metres or so downhill. The path is wet underfoot and we must be careful. As we near the bottom two of the young females are to one side of the path. They are a young white woman in a white t-shirt, khaki shorts with open shirt and a brown woman similarly dressed with a red t-shirt. She has jet black hair and is mixed race. They are both damp from humidity and sweat. They are young and hormonal. I pause by them in shorts and shirtless. I am lightly sweaty among my chest hair and on my biceps. They both look at me in a quasi-erotic lusty way. There is a kind of a spell. They are still prone to these feelings. I hold their gaze for  a while and the spell is broken. I know them to be from the “South”. I pass and they fall in following me further down towards the site.

The path veers down and flattens out. We are now next to a large plunge pool for the creek. The creek flows to the right of the pool which has depth and reeds. The water is crystal clear. Above the creek at the edge of the rain forest I can see kangaroos. Theses are unusual in the terrain. I gesture with finger to lips for silence and point at the kangaroos. I explain that they are a very rare type of wallaby found only here in the tropical northern part of Queensland. The wallabies have come to observe who is approaching the site and what they are doing. The wallabies are “chatting” amongst themselves.

The party continues on to a clearing near the river bank within a quasi-ring of eucalyptus which was a meeting place. There are burn sites there and the site extends in all directions. Here the rain forest is sparse because of the human use over the many years.

I look into the plunge pool and throw out a line. I pull in a big clump of weeds. I know that there are fish there especially near the margin of the creek flow. I should need to fish at the edge of the deep away from the weeds and near the flow. I know that Barramundi the fish is there. He is there with his family. Barramundi will let us have sustenance to add to our pot. But only I must fish for Barramundi in this spot. I see Barramundi the dreamtime. I see Barramundi  the river fish. I know Barramundi and he knows me.

I will feed the party and care for them over the weeks ahead.

The dream ends and I am happy that I have had an uncomplicated dream.

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Earth Dawn – Arabic – Hidden Doorway – Rasta Seer Dream 15-09-23

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

At 06:45 I had a bathroom break and went to bed unsure if I would get back to sleep. I thought to myself lie here and see what dreams might come.

 I drift off and from space I see a planet isolated in space. It is blue and green and white. I know that this planet is the earth. Around it I can see a bright white disc of light, a corona. This layer, atmosphere of light, gradually thickens until it is around 10% of the planetary diameter. The layer implodes and then explodes into a four pointed star of white light. The earth cannot be seen only the light. The points of the star are sharp and about five planetary diameters long at maximum length. They are at the four cardinal directions, emanating from the North and South poles with an East-West perpendicular. After reaching maximum extension they disappear leaving the planet isolated in space without its white light corona.

I know in the dream that I must meditate on this and re-run the vision of the formation of the four pointed star. The dream coincides with sunrise here in France. I have the sensation that something dramatic has happened for the planet. I consciously rebuild the image several times over.

The image fades.

The next dream starts on a large ferry boat. I am sat in the library of the boat. The boat has been purchased for educational purchases but few of the people are using it thus. They are in the bar and the games room. The captain announces that he encourages people to explore the boat and to see what other facilities there are. Some people come to sit at the same table as me. They try to take a couple of my books. I say that I have already loaned them from the librarian. I show them the front of the books where there is a slip of paper with loans on. The loan slips have my name handwritten in blue-black ink and a date stamp which is current for me. The books are texts of physics and chemistry together with ancient occult treatises. These latter manuscripts are very valuable and rare. I have been studying them a long time. The people are surprised at the contrast. I explain that it is natural to me.

The dream shifts to a country estate. We are letting a landowner onto the property. She is wearing a waxed “home counties” style shooting jacket and has a shotgun split in the crook of her left arm. She warns that they have let the dogs off the leash. There are two yappy black dogs and a border collie. I give the collie my fist and he holds it in his mouth we are playing a pulling game of sorts. The woman remarks that I now have a friend and that she, the collie, is rarely like that with any human outside their immediate family.

We carry on around the property and to the place where it adjoins the sea. The woman and the daughter say that this cove is their favourite bit. I point South. I say that I prefer the view of the massif across the strait. There above the azure blue sea I can see a fortress in the bright Mediterranean sun. We are making our way along a cliff side path. I don’t like having people behind me on the path and I come to a tricky bit on the path. I say that I am going to have to sit down because I am getting vertigo. I am stuck. I say that they can take the higher path on the cliff face and I will meet them on the other side.

I sit down. I then edge along the path and around the corner of a rock. Hewn into the cliff face is kind of terrace. On that terrace is a small single slat wooden bench. There is a wooden door painted in a dark pastel blue. I can see the grains of the wood and the rushes on the seat put there for comfort. The door is of antiquity. There is a metal ring about the size of my fist at waist height to right hand side of the door. I shout out, “look there is a hidden door!”

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A voice answers in Arabic that this is the door of El Shab Abdul bin Shamir or something like that. I cannot recall the exact name but it sounds like this and ends in bin —mir. The woman and two young people, men, are coming in the opposite direction along the path. She is speaking Arabic saying that this is the place he {Abdul} came to meditate and it opens into his garden. In the dream I can understand Arabic because of my crusader-priest life.

They round the corner and sit with me on the terrace. There is a suitable rock of a metre or so on the terrace. As she sits her long hair in corn row dreadlocks falls around her shoulders and reaches to the ground. One of her companions plays with her hair and says that she is Rasta. I smile because I knew some Rastafarians. She is half caste and resembles a young Whoopi Goldberg. She has dazzling blue eyes and I know her to be a seeress of some considerable prowess.

She switches to English and we discuss that from time to time she sees the long dead owner of the garden. I say, “his spirit?” “Yes” she replies. “He is a most unusual being.” “I too come here for solace from time to time.”

Unlike for the others there is no need for she and I to open the physical door. We are suddenly on the other side in a small yet exquisite ornamental garden reminiscent of the Alhambra with water fountains and immaculate planting. We are strolling along and I have the profound sense of having met this woman before. The familiarity if strong.

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The scene changes and I am outside a European castle gate. The country is verdant. We are stood by a weir which controls the flow of water through the castle and to the castle fishponds. These ponds are used to provision the castle folk. Every spring they open the sluices for a while to allow the fish from the river into the ponds and to refresh the water. It is the time of the salmon run. People are dressed mediaeval style. There is much excitement because there is plenty to eat after a harsh and boring winter menu. The keeper of the sluice ceremonially starts to open them. The flow is slow at first. Small fish are swimming up the weir. To one side I notice a large silver male salmon leaping up the weir. It has transformed into its breeding shape.  I shout. Everyone looks. There is much joy because the annual salmon run has begun.

I wake up and feel slightly overwhelmed. It is 8:15 AM. What is only a short time in earth time has seemed like an eternity in dream time.

* I have “memories” of verdant Europe, France and a more scorched Mediteranean. The sense of time is around 800 years ago, plus or minus.