15

THE DREAMING OF EARTH

 

To anyone who thinks about it carefully, this must at first seem a rather strange statement: “The process by which he works eventually leads him to his goal”—as if the process had some kind of magic in it, some daemonic will of its own. Indeed, some writers—not the least of them Homer—have taken that point of view, speaking without apology of Muses as, in some sense, actual beings, and of “epic song” and “memory” . . . as forces greater than and separate from the poet. We often hear even modern writers speak of their work as somehow outside their control, informed by a spirit that, when they read their writing later, they cannot identify as having come from themselves. I imagine every good writer has had this experience.

JOHN GARDNER

This “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains” is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: Could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient mysteries?

R. GORDON WASSON

Archi means the first. They are the primary or first things from which all phemonena come—they are the potentials that reside in the quantum multiverse. Archetype, the more familiar term, combines “archi” with “type”—meaning “impression,” from the Greek to beat or strike, to mold. Archetype is the first expression of the archi in identifiable form—though not physically. It means to prefigure or foreshadow. The archetypes, which reside in the imaginal world, prefigure the forms they become in our world. As those archetypes express themselves into classical Newtonian space, they change. They are modified by where and how they appear.

Every form we see in this world is a modified expression of the archetype that underlies it. The essential identity we recognize as plant, for instance, exists as a unique archi in the mythic or quantum world, what Masanobu Fukuoka termed the Ocean of Being that underlies everything. This is the place the Persian storytellers were talking about when they said, “At one time there was a story and there was no one to tell it,” or “At one time there was a story but there was no one to hear it but God.”¹

The archetype of plant, however, is to be found in the imaginal world, the place from which Earth dreams form into being. This is what Lao-tzu was speaking of when he said . . .

Thirty spokes unite in one hub
It is precisely where there is nothing
that we find the usefulness of the wheel²

And when that archetype expresses itself into our world, the archetype alters itself to fit the demands of the field in which it emerges. The living organisms of this world have their roots (spokes) in the imaginal realm. It is from there they are expressed. Together they form the wheel, the Earth system, the thing that is more than the sum of the parts, the entity that circles endlessly in physical space.

Every plant we see is an expression of the underlying archetype whose present form has been altered by the part of the scenario into which it has emerged. The form a plant takes comes from the demands that environment has made on it and those demands are, that shape is, encoded within its seed as heredity. There is only one plant form, Goethe said, and it’s the archetype, or as he called it, the Urpflanze, which resides in the imaginal world. And from this understanding Goethe was able to articulate his great understanding of the metamorphosis of plants, that all parts of the plant are merely leaf morphed into different form to fulfill different function.

It was from his ability to see underlying archetype that Luther Burbank could perceive plants the way he did. He knew, in his experience, that all plant forms began as one central form long ago. He knew that the history of each plant was a history of the demands that environment had made on it over long evolutionary time. He could then bring forth old forms as new food plants or even find ways to cross-breed not only species but genus. He said that the longer ago the divergence occurred, the harder it was, but it could be done. You just had to overcome a lot of inertia.

And it was his capacity to perceive archetype that allowed Masanobu Fukuoka to say . . .

My method of growing rice may appear reckless and absurd, but all along I have sought the true form of rice. I have searched for the form of natural rice and asked what healthy rice is. . . . If you understand the ideal form, it is just a matter of how to grow a plant of that shape under the unique conditions of your own field.³

He was understanding in this that the ideal form (the archetype) underlay all rice expressions and that the archetype would alter itself to fit the shape of the field in which it was grown once it collapsed into form in classical Newtonian space. He knew, too, that the form, as it emerged, could be influenced by numerous factors but that there was one form above others that was the most potent form the rice could take in any particular field. And it was that form he worked to bring most strongly into existence.

All plant forms, as Goethe, Burbank, and Fukuoka knew, come from the original Urpflanze, expressed into the endless variety that occurs when something extrudes itself from the imaginal world into this one. To understand this “is a growing aware,” as Goethe put it, “of the Form with which again and again nature plays, and, in playing, brings forth manifold life.”⁴ Or, as Henri Bortoft describes it, “The archetypal plant as an omnipotential form is clearly a different dimension of the plant than what appears in the space-time dimension as many plants.”⁵ When the archetype of plant manifests in this world, as he says, “It is inherently dynamical and indefinitely flexible.”⁶ The essence of nonlinearity.

When we find our way into the imaginal world, we enter the place where we can perceive the archetypes before they are expressed into form. We enter a distinct and real place, and somewhere deep inside us, we recognize it. It is a place to which some part of us belongs, for we, too, come from archetype. It is an archetype that has expressed itself in multiple forms over long evolutionary time, forms that have also been shaped by the fields in which they have grown.

When we reenter the imaginal world, we touch the place from which our archetype emerged. We find the root of what it is to be human. And we encounter other archetypes, are touched by them, begin to remember the world from which we once came and which still resides deep inside our species memories.

Corbin is clear about the nature of the imaginal world: “In offering the two Latin words mundus imaginalis,” he says, “I intend to treat a precise order of reality corresponding to a precise mode of perception.”⁷ It is the mode of perception turned as a general perceiving onto the textual field that allows that precise order of reality to be experienced. And that place is a living reality. It is not the ancient artefact of a more superstitious age. It is as real now as it ever has been. Entering it, you find as natural scientists, indigenous peoples, writers, poets, singers, have always done, the invisibles that lie underneath this world of form, the archetypes that are the root of all forms we know. As the Bushmen of the Kalahari say, once in this state, you “can see shapes, forms, and even fully developed works of art before they are created.”⁸ Or as R. Gordon Wasson once put it during an experience with psilocybin mushrooms . . .

I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient mysteries.⁹

Looking deeply, you can understand, as Goethe and Burbank and so many others have, that these archetypes, as they come into physical form in what we think of as the world, are only expressions—as they must be—of the textual field itself, of environment. For there is nothing but environment—the thing that is more than the sum of the parts, that invisible aware intelligence that works to keep its self-organization intact. And each archetype that is expressed into this world immediately begins taking on a unique physical form—and associated behaviors—in order to fit into, to fulfill the function necessary for, the particular part of the scenario into which it has been expressed.

just as we do when we are birthed into this world

Specific archetypes are generated into form in a particular place and time necessary to keep homeodynamis intact, to maintain the self-organized field. That is why Lewontin described the objects we tend to look at as foreground as being only concentrated fields that themselves show the shape of environmental space. Form is expressed only to fulfill ecological purpose. Forms are a self-organizational homeodynamis necessity. And these forms . . . they are pulled out of quantum potential by the needs of the environment itself. We are, all of us, dreamed into being by the needs of this place.

Everything we encounter—and every ability, facility, behavioral expression possessed by the phenomena we encounter—has been generated out of the needs of the self-organized system itself. We are all microcosmic instances of a macroscosmic event. And each aspect of the microcosm is inherent in the macrocosm, is a reflection of the macrocosm, the larger system from which it comes.

We dream because the Earth dreams. We sing and know music because the vibrational expression we call music is inherent in this place. We have the capacity to create because the larger system from which we come has at its core the capacity to create. We express new form through dreaming because that is how all form is created in this place. As the poet Dale Pendell once wrote . . .

As dreams are the healing songs
from the wilderness of our unconscious—
So wild animals, wild plants, wild landscapes
are the healing dreams
from the deep singing mind
of the Earth.¹⁰

We are, all of us, dreamed into being. For the Earth lives in a dream. It exists in a very complex form of the state a juggler is in as he juggles, where some deeper part, some dreaming part, of himself maintains the balance point.

The greater part of all self-organized systems exist in a state of deep dreaming, what we, in our hubris, tend to call an unconscious state. This is true of the majority of the self that we call our self. Without most of our consciousness modules in that unconscious dreaming state, coordinating incoming sensory data into a comprehensive communicatory gestalt and generating congruent responses, we could not exist at all. Imagine having to consciously maintain white blood cell generation, analysis, and response; heart function and blood circulation; kidney function and filtering of the blood; skin generation and repair; and all the other billions of billions of living movements that are necessary for our self-organized state to remain intact. No human could do it using the linear, “conscious” mind. As Michael Crichton put it . . .

A human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it’s a swarm of swarms, because each organ—blood, liver, kidneys—is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a body is really the combination of all these organ swarms. . . . It turns out that a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs. Human behavior is determined in many places. The control of our behavior is not located in our brains. It’s all over our bodies. . . . “Swarm intelligence” rules human beings. Balance is controlled by the cerebellar swarm and rarely comes to consciousness. Other processing occurs in the spinal cord, the stomach, the intestine. A lot of vision takes place in the eyeballs, long before the brain is involved. And for that matter, a lot of sophisticated brain processing occurs beneath awareness, too. . . . So, there’s an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and the human sense of self-control and purposeness, is a user illusion. We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do. Just because human beings went around thinking of themselves as “I” didn’t mean it was true.¹¹

It is only because most of our self remains unconscious, that it dreams, that we exist at all. And that same kind of “unconsciousness,” that same kind of dreaming, is what the Earth does and has done every millisecond since its self-organized state began. We are in fact dreamed into being, just as everything that we encounter has been.

As so many spiritual adepts have said, we are dreaming, all of us, all the time. But, truly, it is not possible to awaken in the way we think of it when we speak of sleeping and waking. The most we can do is to become aware that we are dreaming, awaken inside the dream. As Rumi once put it . . .

worlds within worlds;
dreamers concoct entire Baghdads
from their breasts

asleep or waking
where have you seen yourself
mirrored completely?

a dreamer wanders
from room to room

only to awaken
in another sort of room¹²

When we enter the imaginal world through our analogical perceiving, suddenly look up and become aware of that which surrounds us, we wake only inside the dreaming and find that it is itself only another form of dreaming. That is the humor of it and why all those who find the way to this place learn to laugh. What humor! What a joke we have played on ourselves!

Then as always, we drop away from the knowing, begin to move away from such deeps, back into our bodies. For . . .

There is one place
in all the universe
that has been made
especially for you
and that is inside
your own feet.¹³