Sometimes, the Mind Reveals its Depths: Maybe We Carry Ancient Caves in Us Even Today, as We Sing Our Moments onto Their Walls as We Live

I was talking on the phone with a friend who was concerned and anxious about the psychological health of their child. After I hung up, I felt how vulnerable he was and I am ⎼  that we all are. That we are all, every minute, so close to psychological and physical pain, to suffering. We have our routines, beliefs, and understandings, our relationships that create and maintain our sense of normalcy and reality. But that sense is not always as secure, nor as complete and skillful as we’d like.

 

And then I felt, no, I could see something almost indescribable. In my mind, along with the reality of my home, and the trees, bushes, and plants outside, appeared something like a tunnel, darkened by countless ages of humans and the earth. And the suffering of my friend and their child seemed to fit so readily in that tunnel; all our fears, worries, suffering fit in that tunnel as if it was made to do just do that. There was so much emotional pain there, and so much more in addition. Joy? Insight? So much of what all of us shared.

 

And it was so vast; anyone could easily get lost in it. I could easily get lost in it. It could be fearful and yet somehow comforting, intimately, infinitely comforting. And then it was seemingly gone. The birds sang. The food my wife was cooking sizzled.

 

What was it? Was it a revelation or like a waking dream? Did I imagine it, or see something that rarely shows its face? Was it a glimpse of something always with us, but beyond our grasp or control? Or maybe a random image or delusion?

 

Maybe it was related to the collective unconscious that Carl Jung described, filled not only with our own memories and the memories of all beings, but archetypes, the universal or innate patterns of imagery and thinking that have appeared throughout human history? Maybe it was related to what Australian aboriginals call the dreaming, or other cultures call the great dreaming of the earth.

 

In his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin describes creator beings who sang the world into existence; song being the original speech of humans. The origin songs were called songlines, or dreaming tracks, and mark the routes followed by creator-beings as they carved the earth during the Dreamtime, or time of creation.

 

But dreaming tracks are not solely about the past. They mark both a where and a when, a time and all time, or the continuous process linking the Aboriginal people to the land and heavens. According to Wikipedia, a knowledgeable person even today can navigate vast distances, cross deserts and mountains, by singing and following the directions in a songline.

 

Even in the daytime, it seems there’s an underlying stream of imagery running through our minds of which we’re only partly aware. It’s dream-like, in that it’s more emotional in organization than rational. All thoughts can share this dream-like quality, in that they can appear as real as day but be more of a personal fabrication, like a dream of night. So, there’s a bit of dreaming in the day and a bit of awake awareness at night….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

The Well of Ancients: We Live in a Universe, Not A Room

Have images of someplace you have never been, or of a time or situation you have never lived, ever appeared in your mind masquerading as a memory?

 

Years ago, my parents lived in Atlantic City, New Jersey. One night we were driving on Atlantic Avenue, the main street of the city that runs parallel to and often just a block or so away from the ocean. It was raining and the yellow lights reflected off the wet street. The houses on a long section of the avenue are large, expensive dwellings, some old and going back to the 1930s or before. And suddenly I felt we were back in the 1930s during prohibition when some of the homes were owned by mobsters. The whole mood had changed into a feeling different from any other I have ever felt. This happened two or three times.

 

My great aunt Fanny, sister of my maternal grandmother, died when I was in my thirties. When I think of her apartment, I get something closer to a dream than a memory, and just pieces, not the whole. And those pieces are not from the second half of the twentieth century. They are from sometime earlier⎼ with dark hallways, a bedroom with a wall of ornate glass doors which she didn’t have, a window that looked out not onto modern streets but gray mists, people in dark clothes in a village of wood homes, in the “old country” of Eastern Europe from where my relatives emigrated.

 

And from where do our interests come? Why do some subjects, seemingly from before we were born, excite or shake us up, turn us off or get no response at all? I love the art of Japan, Tibet, Indigenous North America, Central Africa, Ancient Greece, and the Middle East, but other places less so or not at all.

 

Twenty years ago, I was on sabbatical from teaching, and my wife and I went to Greece. I taught philosophy to high school students and looked forward to visiting the birthplace of Western European philosophy.

 

We were on the island of Crete, not far from the city of Chania, driving through the mountains after visiting the ancient City of Aptera. The city had come to an end possibly in 1400 CE due to an earthquake. We stopped at the ruins of a Minoan palace, and Roman and Byzantine structures. My wife saw a herd of sheep grazing on the side of the road and asked me to stop. The sheep were not fenced in but moving freely about.

 

We stopped, got out of the car, and walked over to the sheep. I happened to look down, and there, partly exposed, were ancient bricks, Roman, maybe 2000 years old. An archaeological site was close by unearthing a Roman villa from that time, with sculptures, lintels and other artifacts just lying on the ground. We continued our walk and found ruins of a Roman cistern. Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, we saw a German bunker from World War II, and later, an Ottoman fortress.

 

What is it like to live in a place where we literally step on thousands of years of human history? …

 

To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**The photo is of what might be the oldest road in Europe, from Knossos, Crete.