No use of the verb “to be”After a human being has glimpsed the outer orbits of heavenly possibility through any means—whether through falling in love, taking an entheogenic drug, dreaming an astounding dream, or being illuminated in a moment during meditation—that person can no longer peacefully snooze through life. If you’re reading this book, I know you’ve had such a glimpse and that you’ve been moved to restlessness.
As a dreamer, you’re inevitably called to dream yourself awake using the full resources of your imagination and heart. You may have buried or repressed your season of insight, but it happened, and now you are irrevocably changed. The period of fleeting transcendence that we’ve encountered is a wake-up alarm, a call to adventure. The tremendous beauty of the call is usually followed by a viciously challenging low—the breakup of a romance, the come-down off the drug, the having to get up and go to work after the gorgeous dream, the doldrums of ordinary existence after a flash or stretch of huge realization.
This low of coming down from the heights, and the hopelessness that can come with it, can destroy a genius and keep her stuck in an unpleasant state between being fully asleep and fully awake. Following the awakening, it’s therefore imperative that the poet find a means of integrating the heaven she’s glimpsed with the warp and weft of daily life. In other words, it’s imperative that she make her soul.
There are many forces that conspire against the successful completion of this integration, this making. Dreamers are often told that it flat-out isn’t possible to bring heaven to earth. After a dreamer talks to therapists and teachers, parents and even friends about his brushes with the infinite and his desire to enter into a lasting and grounded experience of that bliss, he will likely be told that what he’s asking for is far too grand.
“No one lives in ecstasy,” a friend once told me. “Your problem is that you want to.” On the contrary, I would say that my problem at the time was that I didn’t know how to. My friend was making the strange and unfounded assumption that I was a being incapable of transcendence and magical transformation. She likely made the same sad and unjustified assumption about herself.
The role of your genius spirit is to essentially heal, transform, and evolve consciousness. At this fraught time in our planet’s history, this role is all the more necessary—consciousness must evolve so that from it we can create what cultural philosopher and writer Charles Eisenstein has accurately and romantically called “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” Too often, however, geniuses are encouraged to use their abilities to fulfill predefined roles in existing institutions: artist, teacher, minister, professor. These functions serve the maintenance of the existing society, the existing order of things. Yet the existing order of things is itself greatly disturbed and out of harmony, the product of a level of consciousness that needs raising and healing.
So the dreamer who works to maintain the present order and to succeed within it becomes out of harmony with herself. In this condition, she’s a sleepwalker.
A sleepwalker is not quite awake, and neither is she asleep in her bed. She’s a being maneuvering simultaneously in dreams and in actuality, in danger of destroying herself and those that surround her as she moves here and there without conscious volition or awareness. This is the pain of knowing that there’s a more gorgeous world and yet believing that its manifestation is impossible. This pain causes a restlessness that is sufficient to make its sufferer stir and wander, but not great enough to entirely wake her.
To wake up, the sleepwalker first needs to honestly admit that she’s still asleep—sleeping is all she knows—and a part of her doubts that anything else lies beyond.
If you feel trapped or limited in life, admit it. Admit that the present way of things does not correspond to the deeper truth present within you. Admit what sleepwalking feels like, the dull pain of it.
The burden of a dreamer is to make consistently manifest for herself and for others the profound love and beauty she’s encountered. As long as she denies her duty and her ability to bring forth this manifestation, she stays asleep in denial.
Denial of our extraordinary potential as healers and agents of evolution is a huge and pervasive danger to our souls. It causes us to do taxing and destructive things in order to stay asleep. In many cases, geniuses maintain their sleepwalking through acute addictions to drugs, sex, and food.
These addictions are so engrossing and seductive that they consume the spiritual energy the genius could otherwise use to awaken. In addiction, we become unendingly thirsty for things that are material substitutes for immaterial power. We try to fill a spiritual hunger with material substances, and we end up more thirsty and sick than ever—like drinking seawater and dying of thirst.
Less acutely, but ultimately no less destructively, a sleepwalking genius may numb herself with intellectual rationalizations, doubts, and self-criticisms. She convinces herself that the sleeping world is the only real one and insulates herself from full waking by concentrating intently on the practical details of achieving success and recognition in the sleeping world. She still participates in an addiction, but on a more general scale—she’s an addict in the societal sphere, through consumption.
The frustrations of sleepwalking are so great that the dreamer may wish for ignorance—to be able to play the game of ordinary life without any suspicion of something more. But this is impossible. The call has happened. The restlessness has set in and must be fully dealt with.
In my time teaching soulmaking at the University of Pittsburgh, I met many students whose young lives were packed with pressure, overflowing with opportunity, and rife with falsehood.
Students from all corners of the university—business, neuroscience, pharmacy, history—would sign up for my course in order to fulfill a general requirement and would find themselves at the mercy of a crazed madwoman—namely, me.
When my students learned that soulmaking involved not just the reading of poetry (as the official course title suggested) but also the cultivation of poetic perception and the writing of poetic texts, these tightly wound, extremely brilliant young people would freak out—and with very good reason too.
Since soulmaking is the contemplative seeking of extrarational truths followed by the creative expression of those truths discovered, practicing it tends to take you right up into your system of denial, eventually confronting you with so much of its ripe fragrance that your carefully instilled program of socially learned untruth collapses amidst the fumes.
This can be extremely threatening, since many students have created gleaming lives for themselves that succeed fully at getting them social approval from their parents, peers, and all their professors—from everyone except for me, the eccentric hippy lady who babbles about truth and beauty all the time. Indeed, they’ve thrown their full genius into the creation of this, so it’s a rather powerful front. It has a momentum all its own.
The tough thing about genius, though, is that it’s never satisfied making a life that’s false. It wants to make a life that’s totally real—so it will screw with you relentlessly until you stop making lies and start making soul.
The poet and critic Edward Hirsch rightly observed that “poetry is a soulmaking activity.” In other words, practicing it has the effect of making you more fully yourself.
We accomplish this task of becoming more fully ourselves by deciding to read this world through the vulnerable wisdom of our hearts rather than through the steely criticism of our minds.
The poet Walt Whitman called our criticizing, calculating mind “the brain that divides,” and, not unlike Keats, he recommended abandoning it. (Once I gave an assignment that asked students to deeply engage with Whitman’s poetry, and one student fulfilled the assignment by making a stencil and spray-painting “Abandon the brain that divides” on a wall near her dorm. I wanted to give her a medal.)
Poetry is a soulmaking activity because it involves looking for the holistic truth that the heart sees, rather than the divisive truth of the mind, and then expressing that truth in a way that’s creative—i.e., in a way that creates an experience of that truth in other people. This creative expression isn’t limited to what folks conventionally recognize as poetry or art—we can creatively share truth with others in myriad ways, from the way we carry ourselves to the parties we throw.
So what happens if you’re a dreamer who has great genius and you don’t turn from lie-making to soulmaking?
I’ve observed the following symptoms: a propensity for disturbing nightmares, painful romances, dangerous accidents, drug addiction, emotional numbness, and chronic illness. Not all symptoms exist in one individual at one time, but there’s usually some combination at work. Also, I’ve met and loved folks who do have all the symptoms happening simultaneously—they wake up in cold sweats, have screaming matches with their paramours, scorch themselves with hot water while making oatmeal, smoke weed everyday, feel dead inside, and enjoy irritable bowel syndrome.
Such a multilayered extravagance of misery results when the level of delusion in one’s life is especially high—this kind of pain happens when one is not just deluding oneself but also deliberately deceiving others in order to perpetuate the delusion that one cherishes. A tangled web? Oh, yes.
You may be afflicted by one or more falsehood symptom and not even realize or be able to admit just how much of a giant problem it is until you begin practicing contemplative truth-seeking and creative expression.
This was the case for Lilly, a high-achieving prelaw student in my soulmaking class who suffered from terrible nightmares. When she first learned that the class involved getting in touch with your heart’s truth and expressing it in poetry, she balked—she explained to me that she “wasn’t creative.”
When I voiced my skepticism about the matter of her non-creativeness, she confessed that when she was young she loved writing poetry but had ceased when her grief over the death of someone very close to her made the attention and openness that writing demanded painful.
Lilly realized, rightly, that in order to write poetry, she would need to be connected to her poetic self, with all its swelling feelings, which would mean fully experiencing and exploring her immense grief. She felt that if she opened up to it, her grief would overwhelm her and destroy her.
In order to prevent being thus overwhelmed, Lilly had stopped writing poetry and had focused all of her genius into getting scholarships for college and then into getting the right grades for law school.
This would all be great except she had terrible insomnia because when she slept, nightmares about her losing her loved one would assail her.
Lilly noted that other people often told her she was cold and aloof—and she could see that they were right. She didn’t want to open up to her friends, because she didn’t want to feel anything at all. Lilly’s decision to cover up her grief with business and achievement was a false solution.
I want to be clear that by calling Lilly’s cover-up a “false solution” I am not deriding her or the rest of us who prop up our lives with similar makeshift splints.
When we come up with false solutions to the real problems of our existence, we do this not because of any personal lack of intelligence or imagination, but because our culture in general is wisdom deficient. There are very few places in our society where we can learn to practice the kind of open-eyed faith and salty optimism that it takes to endure the pain of loss, grief, and failure with no retreat into false solutions.
If you’ve got one or more of the difficult symptoms of long-term lie-making happening in your life, I’m going to invite you to do what I’ve done, and what I invite my suffering students like Lilly do: seek living, breathing help.
Seek lots of help, in multiple forms. Therapists, life coaches, support groups, twelve-step fellowships, friends who are happy and healthy can all be fantastic resources. Do not call your friend who only has sex with married people, falls down stairs, drinks beer for breakfast, and frequently breaks out in hives, to help you with your nightmares, shouting matches, oatmeal burns, weed-smoking, and irritable bowel syndrome.
After you’ve established living, breathing support for yourself, I suggest that you undertake the same experiment in soulmaking that Lilly undertook to begin reclaiming her truth, her feeling self, and her creativity. And of course that means waking your genius.
Paradoxically, as dreamers, in order to wake up from our sleepwalking, we need to go deeper into our dreaming. The stuff of our nighttime dreams, our poetry, our fancy, the various bits of psychic sparkly stuff that we habitually ignore and dismiss—this is the stuff we need to collect and interact with in deep reverence. By doing this, we honor our poet spirits, our daimons.
The daimon is our highest potential, our most powerful self. It’s a spiritual image of possibility that hovers in our morphic field of energy and calls us to grow into it, just as the spiritual image of a resplendent oak hovers in the energy field surrounding an acorn. The daimon knows who we are and who we can be. It has a vivid connection to the daimon of the world, too, and connects us not only to our personal journey but to that of the planets.
Our egos resist attending with tender reverence and seriousness to our dreams and fantasies. “I have more important things to do” is its ever-present claim.
It takes sincere humility and rich honesty to embark on this project of uniting the conscious and the unconscious, order and energy. Honor your struggles and your frustrations as you move forward with this process, because nothing about it is easy.
The play we’re undertaking requires reverence and devotion—reverence for our own daimons, for all the poets around us (sleeping or waking), for every element of our environment, natural or humanmade. Our present culture derides reverence and devotion as foolish attitudes that make one vulnerable to manipulation and control.
Criticism and mocking are much more cool these days than earnest appreciation. But reverence is to the soul what the most nutritious food is to the body. The soul can live on irreverence and criticism, fault finding and cynicism—but these are poor nurturance. Our genius can come into its full vitality when we practice offering wonder and deep attention to the life around us. What we offer to the world is actually what we offer to our own soul, and our soul thrives or falls weak accordingly.
To have a weak soul, a starving genius, is to have a hungry ghost within, a monster who is never satisfied and will devour beauty and joy out of your life like the terrible Minotaur beneath the ancient city of Knossos on Crete who demanded sacrifices of youths and maidens. The Minotaur came into existence because King Minos of Crete refused to offer forth the great gift that had been bestowed to him. When out of fear and greed we refuse to offer our deepest gifts, we create a terror that eats us alive.
Reverence and devotion don’t have to be heavy and dry. They can be light, erotic, liberating, and playful. All of the creative experiments in this book call upon your reverence and devotion in concrete practices.
It’s a good idea as you travel this path to practice offering your reverence and respect to every person you meet and your devotion to the spirit of love in them.
Try this: When in conversation, allow your own mind to grow very quiet as you listen to another person. Don’t internally argue with or amend what the other person says. Offer your listening presence as a whole gift. Be the presence of love for the one speaking. Don’t concern yourself with approving or rejecting the content of what the person says or even who she is. Simply be present, open, and nonjudging. Be the space in which the other can unfold. When it’s your turn to talk, your reply may come more slowly, since you haven’t been busily formulating it as the other person spoke. Embrace and allow that slowness. See how it alters the quality of your communication and the enjoyment you have in conversation.
This is a gentle and practical form of meditation that strengthens your daimon and fuels your ecstatic awakening.
As you cultivate the silence within you through this kind of listening and through daily deep meditation, you will become much more sensitive to the spiritual nuances at work in your life and in your relationships. We all have spiritual senses, just as we have bodily senses. These spiritual senses go uncultivated in most of us; it’s not something that’s taught in most schools.
Once you’ve cultivated the ability to listen to others with inner quiet, reverence, and love, you’ll find that you hear them in a whole other way. You hear them through your heart—you’ll receive and partake of their heart’s energy as you listen to them speak. Through this reception, you’ll learn much more about the person you’re listening to than you would through mere cognitive listening. You’ll intuit their whole history of sorrows and joy, connections and solitudes. Sentences that formerly would have struck you as wrongheaded, which you would have previously dismissed, will now touch you differently. You’ll feel the heart in those sentences, the energy within the form of the words—and you’ll discern that you’re able to receive rich and profound gifts from people you otherwise would ignore.
This practice is richly liberating, because through it you can learn how to love and sincerely enjoy a much greater range of people. By letting your judging mind recede, your daimon is free to be strengthened by the exchange of love and reverence with others.
As we cultivate our reverence and devotion for others, we are able to be more fully present to our own dreams and fantasies, our own daimon.
To hear our hearts, we have to soften, to set aside for a time our concern with winning and surviving, and to tune instead to our own desire to evolve into something higher. We open ourselves to the gifts of the unconscious, of energy unbound, of Shakti, of dreaming.
We may have a long history of disclosing our dreams and fantasies, our wildest revelations, to others and being met with incomprehension and nonacknowledgment ranging from cool politeness to blatant cruelty. It could be that we’ve been seeking permission from others for a long time to be our fully empowered, daimonic self.
This seeking is not evidence of a weakness or a character flaw on our part. It’s natural to seek validation of our real selves, and real potential from those around us.
The trouble is that we live in a culture where most other people, even those who love us dearly, are themselves spiritually and emotionally wounded to a profound degree and therefore unable to properly see or receive us with the kind of reverence and devotion we’ve just been talking about—which is actually the right of every soul to receive.
We’ve sought reverence and validation from others, and we have not received it. The pain of this is tremendous and can feed our feeling of helplessness.
We’re in a very difficult position. We have to exercise the courage to give to ourselves the reverence that the people around us can’t and won’t be able to provide. This decision is frightening, because it feels like we’re going against the common social reality and inventing our own—and this is indeed exactly what we’re doing—because our common social reality is lacking and ailing.
We have to have faith that our dreams and inklings are worthy of tender attention, embodiment, development, reflection. No rational or objective argument can support us in this choice to love ourselves so wildly. Love is never “justified.” It’s always a leap of faith, a leap that takes us out of the mainstream and much more fully into ourselves.
By choosing to believe something we cannot objectively know to be true (that we and everything else are worthy of rich reverence), we take radical responsibility for our own existence. This radical responsibility has the effect of causing us to become more fully subjective. The existential philosopher Kierkegaard remarked that everyone thinks it’s easy to be subjective—but actually it’s the hardest thing of all, to become fully and fearlessly oneself. It’s a project that means withdrawing oneself from the safety of general agreement about how reality functions and who we are.
There is a very pervasive web of falsehoods that the dreamer must wake from in order to start on her path. These are the lies of the mad world, the system of delusion maintained by human drama and ignorance. “The mad world” is a shorthand name for all the misconceptions and confusions that lead us to create a world of cruel competition and exaggerated scarcity, a world where profit is considered more important that human need.
The mad world is a condition in which we’re desperately trying to control ourselves, other people, and all the factors that surround us out of an intense survival anxiety. It’s a world in which technology and science, surveillance and laws, discipline and punishment are used to maximum effect in order to produce a very tenuous and unsustainable version of security in which we’re not only not actually safe but also bored and depressed. The mad world is the result of a severe lack of imagination, a dearth of the visionary poet’s perception that reveals the underlying flow uniting all phenomenon.
A fundamental lie of the mad world, and one that the soulmaker must confront early on, is this: “You are who we say you are.”
The game of “You are who we say you are” begins at birth, when we receive our names, and continues through our educations and our childhoods. We internalize the “You are who we say you are” game and come to believe “I am who they say I am.” We learn to believe the things about ourselves that other people tell us. We trust the perception of our family and teachers and friends above our own. We trust them implicitly—they seem to know more than we do, they seem to know who we are, and we believe them.
The trouble is that very often the people around us lack the visionary perception that would allow them to see who we truly are—resonant, pulsing, powerful, and beautiful loci of awakening. Instead, the people around us see only their own perception of us, a perception influenced and distorted by a million different factors, but mostly conditioned by the limits of who they believe themselves to be.
Playing the “I am who they say I am” game usually goes fine until we start to notice that sometimes it hurts to believe that we are who they say we are.
The dreamer embarks on her journey when she decides to absolutely stop playing the “I am who they say I am” game and radically reclaims her right to define her own identity. This decision constitutes a crossing of a major threshold. It takes her beyond the pale of the ordinary social world. It’s a decision that is easy to say but much more difficult to carry out. It launches the poet into a vulnerable, liminal state wherein she lacks an identity dictated by others and does not yet possess a fully formed identity of her own making. This state of vulnerability can be intensely disorienting and uncomfortable. We tend to cling to our identification with whatever we’ve been told about ourselves, because any identity is more secure than uncertainty, namelessness, spaciousness, and not knowing. Yet those are the difficulties we need to embrace as we set out. We need to deny and strip away any limited notions about ourselves that we may carry.
What would it mean for you to cede yourself from the definitions placed upon you by your family, your local culture? What would it feel like? What could you experience in yourself once removed from the name, identity, and limits given to you by others? Write your answers to these questions in your common-place book.
Begin to experiment with making the decision within yourself to “cede,” to “stop being theirs.” Write out affirmations of your decision in your common-place book, practice saying it silently to yourself, and see what arises. What would hold you back from stepping outside your socially defined identity? What do you still hope to gain from it? Keep practicing your decision—writing it, saying it, thinking it. This takes focus and repetition, energy and concentration. You won’t accomplish it in just one sitting. It’s a decision to be made again and again, until it hits the core of you.
When the lies of the mad world have all been broken with, a condition of grace appears that has been widely reported by the mystics and sages of the world. It’s been variously called the “Kingdom of Heaven,” “Nirvana,” and “the Tao,” among many other names. I like to call it the gift world, because it’s a subjective experience of total, unreserved gratitude in which everything that appears is experienced as a priceless and delightful gift. This condition confounds and contradicts all the rules of the mad world. In the mad world, nothing is free, and every “gift” creates a burden of debt. In the gift world, all is free, and no debt is possible. The gift world is the condition of bliss experienced by a fully evolved soul. One way of thinking about the gift world is that it’s a morphic field of joy and love that shapes systems under its influence into expressions of joy and love—i.e., into gifts.
In the gift world, since you have no need to control, there’s no fear. As the teacher Adyashanti has observed, fear is just a by-product of frustrated control. In the gift world, you do things, but nothing you do is “work” in the sense that we’ve come to think of it, because your security and your identity don’t come from what you accumulate as a result of your effort. Instead, you give your efforts freely, accruing no obvious security or bolstering to your separate ego-self. As you give in this manner, your wants and needs are subsequently mysteriously met in delightful and miraculous ways by the universe.
This miraculous movement happens because, as Lewis Hyde wrote in his seminal work The Gift, when gifts received are consumed or passed on, the spiritual power at work in the gift grows—more is drawn forth, more gifts flow to you. When gifts received are hoarded, stored up, or used only to accrue individual gain, the spiritual power at work in the gift departs—it dries up, and no more gifts come to you. The gift spirit as it moves creates connection and joy, satisfaction and fulfillment, among a circle of givers and receivers. The gift as it is hoarded creates disconnection and ennui, alienation and discontent.
Our genius is clearly a gift given to us by the source. We didn’t manufacture our genius deliberately, of our own clever device. We didn’t make it out of duct tape and cardboard. It came to us freely, from outside our own will and effort. When we dreamers use our gift of genius only to promote ourselves, only to make ourselves as individual egos more secure and safe in a seemingly threatening universe—we then betray the spirit of the gift. We become hoarders. The genius then stops giving us ideas and inspirations and means to carry those out, because we’ve proven ourselves ungrateful. When we wrongly use gifts graciously bestowed upon us as possessions to which we are entitled, the spirit of the gift dies.
It was a revelation to me when I learned from Lewis Hyde about the need of the gift to move. While it made deep sense to me on one level, on another it contradicted the perverse notions of gift reception that I’d learned in childhood: gifts are given to me on my birthday and at Christmas and they are MINE, all MINE. I was taught that to give away a gift that I received as a birthday or a Christmas present was rude. Not only this, but I was prevented from actually formally reciprocating the gifts given to me.
When I was invited as a guest to the birthday parties of other children, the birthday gifts bestowed on my friends by “me” were plastic toys bought by my mother. I was not allowed to give the pine cones and twigs, the flowers, and quartz pebbles I really wanted to give. The toys my mother presented did not come from me—they had nothing to do with me. I was deluged with gifts and yet kept out of the circle of giving—and perhaps unsurprisingly, the gifts I was given in this fashion meant nothing to me on a deep level. They represented nothing to me but a hoard of “my” toys. The ethos of giving and receiving taught to me thus denied the actual spirit of the gift.
Awakening your genius is a path of learning to embrace and embody the real spirit of the gift: it’s a cycle of learning to embrace with rich gratitude all that comes to us, to transform it and to be transformed by it, and then to give it forth again for others to be also inspired.
In order to start our mythic journey to end our suffering, we need to enter into a real and dynamic dialogue with our hearts. Start by writing a letter to your heart, telling it all that’s going on with you now and asking it for guidance.
After you’ve written this letter to your heart, write a response to yourself from your heart’s perspective. In other words, create a letter from your heart to you. Your heart knows things that your conscious mind doesn’t. In order to access that intuitive knowing, it will help if you write your letter from your heart to yourself in dreamspeak.
Dreamspeak is a mode of language that accesses the same tools of interweaving and meaning-making that our nighttime dreams use. It’s the language of the unconscious.
Dreamspeak has the following characteristics:
No use of the verb “to be”
This means that dreamspeak avoids all conjugations of “to be,” including be, being, am, is, are, will be, was, were, and have been. Similar simple verbs that dreamspeak does allow include become, has, have, do, can, will, should, ought, may, remain, and equal. Dreamspeak excludes “to be” verbs because such verbs have a tendency to imply stasis and absolute identity, where actually the soul knows that only activity and fluidity present themselves.
Metaphoric naming
Dreamspeak disallows conventional or habitual proper names for people and places. Instead, dreamspeak invites you to coin new names for people and places based on descriptive or associate qualities. For example, if you’re writing about your friend John in dreamspeak, you would not call him John but perhaps “The Long-Haired Wanderer.” If you’re writing about Australia, you might rename Australia “Upside-Down Land.” Dreamspeak also discourages conventional or habitual names for everyday objects and invites you to coin new names for those too. So for example—in dreamspeak, you might call a tree a “spreads-forth” or a “tall green.”
Allusions
Dreamspeak invites elaborate and associative references to words and things and places you’ve experimented in books, films, travel, foreign languages, conversation—and, of course, nighttime dreams. If you’ve dreamed recently about being trapped inside an amusement park closed for wintertime with a pack of rabid dogs, you might allude to those dogs and that park in your dreamspeak. If you’ve been reading books on yoga and you’re fascinated with the Sanskrit vocabulary of yogic practices, you might include some of those words in your dreamspeak.
In dreamspeak, we’re free to make up new words by combining elements from already-existing words to create new in-between meanings. So if a landscape is both rocky and boring, we might in dreamspeak say that it’s “bocky” or “roring” or even just “bocking.”
Neologisms
Go ahead and just plain make up words and expressions.
Sensory Amplification
If you get stuck or slowed down in your dreamspeak writing, you might try amplifying something that you’ve already noted by describing it with similes that reference all five of the physical senses. So maybe you’ve written the word “soil.” You might go on to say, “The soil smells like tar. It looks like the spit-up of baby plants. It sounds like insects toiling. It feels like a soft disaster. It tastes like the end of a night.”
Nonlinear
In dreamspeak, there’s no need for a linear narrative or argument to be present. Feel free to just riff. You might spiral around a topic or an idea in several different ways. You might go on wild tangents. That’s perfect.
Puns
Dreamspeak invites puns. Puns are simultaneously plays on the meanings and the sounds of words or phrases. Once, puns were considered a very high form of humor—isn’t that hilarious? Well, I at least find it punny.
Free association
Maybe you write down “daffodil” and that makes you think of old Victorian daguerreotypes, which makes you remember the guy you dated once who was really into those and hated Christmas, which makes you think of how you really love Christmas, which makes you think of your complicity in American consumer junk culture, which makes you think about the soft pretzels and slushies that they sold at Hill’s when you were a kid and your mom took you there and the popcorn was always stale. So in dreamspeak, go ahead and write about all that: “Daffodil daguerreotype Matt Christmas junk Mother Hill’s layaway pretzel slushies stale.”
No fidelity to “reality” required
In dreamspeak, it’s fine to write about or be inspired by “real” events and things, but you’re not at all limited to describing reality. You have full poetic license to wildly make stuff up.
So, using dreamspeak and writing as if from your heart to your conscious self, discover the following: What does your heart ask you to do? What does it warn you about? What does it know about your potential that you don’t know yet? How is it beckoning you forward to the gift of ecstatic joy? What sounds, smells, sights, places, visions, scents does it invoke in order to call you onward? How does it address you? What instructions does it give you?
Write for at least twenty minutes, uninterrupted.
Now take a break from the letter. Do something grounding and practical: wash the dishes, go for a walk. When you return, reread the letter slowly, imagining that it’s not just nonsense or “poetry” but a real missive from the center of your being that you have a deep obligation to understand and then to take into account in the way you live your life. Now write about the experience of receiving this letter from your heart. How does it make you feel to receive such a letter? What does each sentence, each image, do to you? Take your time and describe your reaction to the letter without judgment.
By giving this kind of weight and seriousness, this kind of attention and reflection, to the “nonsense” that comes in dreamspeak from our hearts, we are doing something very different from what we usually do. We are powerfully admitting that we can no longer ignore our heart’s wisdom, that we must attend to it and give it weight. This is a deeply integrative act that will ultimately lead to us being able to inhabit our genius and the gift world it draws. In doing this work, we admit that we can’t find our way to the gift world with only the power of our conscious minds—we have to delve deeper, into the realm of image and dream and feeling.
As your reflect, answer the following questions about your heart’s letter in writing:
What phrase or sentence out of all that you’ve written strikes you as the most attractive?
What about that attracts you
?
What phrase or sentence strikes you as the least relevant?
What about that seems irrelevant?
If that phrase were relevant to you, who would you be?
How do you feel about the way your heart addresses you?
What do you notice about how your heart describes you?
What do you notice about what your heart asks you to do?
What unknown territory does your heart call you toward?
What would it feel like to arrive at the place your heart calls you to?
Every day for a week, spend an extended period fully and richly imagining what it would feel like to arrive at the place your heart calls you to.
Here’s what my heart wrote to me the first time I practiced this Experiment:
Mirabilis,
If you follow the thorough-wood to the end of debt, rewards come. All the edges of the Green House cry out for you. There rises a scent on the air of muddled plum. GO to the ripeness. Live purpled. Open your mouth at the jar. Tell the longest tale. The sound belongs to the shaman boy playing the piano in the dark cavern bottomed by long orange moss, along with the violin.
Surrender what you have tried to make. Surrender becoming grand and whole and simply live it, like the moth on the window. Stop seeking permission to live a vast art. Respect the art that you do every moment, give it loving attention. The sound of this call sounds with the violin and piano at the cavern, sounds with the dance you perform at the end of the ledge. Make your respect for you as huge as the great water. Don’t dare to doubt the act as it unfolds, though you think no one else sees it. Don’t dare to disrespect the symphony your essence broadcasts each moment.
I promise you a juicing pear, the song Hallelujah, a couch in the kitchen. I promise you the bliss of Mirabai, the visit of the flute player, the ecstasy of Rumi. I promise you your sushumna shining like a beacon. I promise you the whole freedom, the freedom of total respect.
You look like the ragged meadow. You sound like the piano in the cavern. You smell like the honeysuckle on the cityscape. You sound like the silence of electric voices. You feel like the inside of a hot window. You taste like the newness of death.
Love,
Your Heart
Here’s my work on the call in my heart’s letter:
What phrase out of all that your heart told you resonates with you as most pertinent?
“Stop seeking permission to live a vast art. Respect the art that you do every moment, give it loving attention.”
What about this catches you most? What grabs your attention?
The notion that my whole life could be a “vast art,” and that I could deeply respect it as such, is attention-grabbing and inspiring. It’s certainly a lot more than the world at large encourages me to do in terms of respecting myself. It makes me feel like daring to respect myself that much.
What phrase or sentence most repels you, or strikes you as the least relevant to your situation?
“Go to the ripeness. Live purpled.”
What about that repels you or seems irrelevant?
It sounds like something from a fluffy ’90s self-help book for women. I mean, I kind of ferociously love those books—but it sounds goofy and cheesy. It reminds me of my ex-best-friend, who shared my love for those kinds of books and who loved purple and loved fruits.
If that phrase were relevant, what would it be relevant to?
The sense that I have recently of coming close to fruition, of approaching my real self, of letting my freak flag fly.
How do you feel about the way your heart addressed you?
It’s scary that it calls me “Mirabilis,” because that means “miracle worker” to me and I still don’t feel like I know how to work miracles—yet I know that sometimes they do happen through my work—people getting spiritually and aesthetically turned on. I still don’t feel like I know how to harness or regulate these miracles. So I still feel very amateur.
What do you notice about how your heart addresses you?
My heart describes me in terms of things I’ve seen and felt and smelled today, things that were very beautiful and that writing is so inadequate to capture—things that I feel in general inadequate to capture. Things that I generally just try to take into my consciousness and let work on me, let become me. So I guess that’s why my heart describes me in those terms.
What do you notice about what your heart asks you to do?
There are a lot of ritual elements in it—I feel like I’m being ordered to be a priestess again, like I was as a child when I was a colombe in the Rosicrucian temple my father attended. I feel like I’m being asked to put myself at risk—“this is the dance you perform at the end of the ledge.”
What unknown territory does your heart call you toward?
“The end of debt,” “the bliss of Mirabai,” “the whole freedom.”
What would it feel like to arrive at the place your heart calls you to?
Deep power, freedom from self-doubt or self-reproach, being internally, rather than externally, guided. Not looking for external reassurance. Nonconditionally regarding myself as an amazing work of art, liberated from disrespecting myself under any circumstances—thus able to love myself unconditionally under all circumstances.
Write your responses to these questions in your common-place book.
1. Are you practicing metta cultivation? What are you experiencing so far in your practice?
2. Are you writing down your dreams in the morning in your common-place book? What are you dreaming about? What elements in your dreams intrigue you? These intriguing elements can suggest to you things and situations in your life you may need to get honest with yourself about as you tune in to your heart’s call. What might those things be?
3. What fearful thoughts or doubts do you have about undertaking this soulmaking work to awaken your genius? Is it silly, a waste of time, too dangerous? Make a list. Circle the thought that strikes you as most stressful or paralyzing. Now slow down and ask your heart the following questions, taking time to write out your responses: Does that thought describe reality? How do I live when I accept that thought as a true report about what’s real? How would I feel now and what might I do if I had no ability to accept that thought as real?