I read this great post on Sadiq‘s Blog The Technology of the Heart entitled more Dreams Sent Our Way . He talked about dreams being symbolic messages which arise from the knowledge hidden in the center of being and their place in the mystical tradition especially the Sufi tradition. There are a great many source’s Sadiq used. He refers back to the Greatest Shaykh Ibn Arabi, Sara Sviri’ s book The Taste of Hidden Things: Images on the Sufi Path. He then goes on to share with us some of the dreams some readers have shared with the readers of his blog. He then give a beautiful story of dream interpretation from the Chistiyya tradition.

I thought to do a  few things, one tell everyone to visit Sadiq’s Blog, he is one of the reason I got into blogging to be honest. Two I thought to add something I read about on dreams today In Llewellyn Vaughan Lee‘s Love is a Fire

Enjoy

Dave

______________

PSYCHOLOGY AND DREAMWORK

When Irina Tweedie went to India to study with a Sufi master, she said, “I hoped to get instructions in yoga, expected wonderful teachings. But what the teacher did was mainly to force me to face the darkness within myself, and it almost killed me.” Every wayfarer has to face the darkness within, what Carl Jung called “confronting the shadow.” Unless you face your own darkness you cannot purify yourself, you cannot create a clear inner space for your Higher Self to be born into consciousness. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Then he humorously added, “The latter process, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

Every path has its own methods for inner purification. The dhikr works in the unconscious, bringing the power of His name into the darkness. The meditation of the heart not only takes us beyond the mind, it also has the powerful effect of energizing the psyche and bringing our darkness to the surface. Like soapy water bringing the grime to the surface, meditation brings our darkness out of the unconscious. Anger, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, all the shadow feelings that we like to keep hidden, come up within us, forcing us to confront and accept them.

The Naqshbandi path has always stressed the importance of psychological work, and many of the initial challenges faced by the wayfarer involve accepting and loving her own rejected self, and doing battle with the nafs, the Sufi term for our lower nature. However, one of the difficulties of using traditional Sufi terminology for inner work is that the Eastern psyche is structured differently from ours in the West. For example, people in India are much closer to the collective, the family is much more central to their lives, while in the West we have a more developed individuality. This is the immense value of Jungian psychology. Carl Jung gave us a model of psychological transformation that is based upon the Western psyche. He understood the processes of inner transformation that happen on the spiritual journey, and expressed these processes in a contemporary terminology.

When my teacher went to India she had studied Jungian psychology and was amazed to find that her teacher’s process of spiritual training had similarities to Jung’s process of individuation, although Bhai Sahib knew nothing of Western psychology. When she returned to the West she incorporated a Jungian model of psychological transformation to help the wayfarer understand the work of “polishing the heart.” “Confronting the shadow” is the first step on the psycho-spiritual journey, followed by making a relationship with one’s inner partner, the animus or anima in Jungian terminology, and then entering the archetypal realm, the world of the gods and goddesses. This psychological map leads us further, into the dimension of the Self, “that boundless power, source of every power, that lives within the heart.” But finally psychology and Sufism part, because psychology aims at living a balanced life in this world, while the mystic leaves behind the ego, becoming lost in love’s infinite oneness.

Sufis have also always valued dreams, and are often guided by dreams. Bahâ ad-dîn Naqshband, the founder of our order, was renowned as an interpreter of dreams. Our path integrates dreamwork within a spiritual context, and at our meetings we meditate, drink tea (an important time of just being together with other wayfarers), and share dreams. Just by our sharing a dream with an open heart its message can be heard. Dreams come from the unknown. Sometimes they retell the images of our daily life or lead us down confused corridors. But some dreams speak with the voice of the soul.

They have a quality, a music, a depth of feeling that belong to the sacred part of ourself. Such dreams open “a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of our soul.” Listening to these dreams, we can hear the voice of our deeper self. Speaking to us in its own language, a language of images, symbols, and feelings, a dream can guide us through the tortuous maze of our psyche.

As both teacher and guide, these dreams are of infinite value on the inner journey. They call us inward into the mystery and wonder that is our real nature. When the body is asleep, when our everyday life has laid down its burdens, these dreams tell us of another world and of a winding pathway that can lead us into the depths.

Sharing dreams, we all share in this mystery, and it doesn’t always matter if a dream is understood consciously, because there is a deeper understanding of the soul. The soul of the listener hears the soul of the dreamer speak through the dream. Learning to listen to dreams, we attune ourself to the mystery of what is hidden within us, to the stories of our deeper self. Sufis listen with the ear of the heart, a heart that is open and receptive not just to the words that are spoken, but to the feelings and energy that come from the dreamer. With the ear of the heart we learn to catch the thread that is the guidance of the dream, the way the dream can lead us through the maze of ourself into the beyond.

Listening to ourself we come to understand more fully the complexities and simplicity of our nature. And within the shifting images of our dreams we catch the deeper meaning of our life’s journey, the pattern of our life seen from the perspective of the soul, not the limited horizon of the ego. Dreamwork practiced within a spiritual context reawakens our inner perception, our ability to follow our inner path amidst the distractions of the outer world. Our own dreams and the stories of others tell the tale of the soul going Home, of finding the treasure hidden within us. Dreams guide us and teach us to catch the signs of our outer life and inner nature. They are the oracles of today, our own inner wisdom speaking to us.

Related articles

• Leaving This world Behind from The Anthology of Persian Sufi literature (mycaravanofdreams.com)
• Confronting our darkness from Love is a Fire – The Sufis Mystical Journey Home by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (mycaravanofdreams.com)
• The Golden Eternity and a comment from Llewellyn Vaughan Lee’s Fragments of a Love Story (mycaravanofdreams.com)
• The archetypes are gods: Re-godding the archetypes, by John H. Halstead (humanisticpaganism.wordpress.com)
• Dreaming: Our Companion Metaphors (whitecranes.wordpress.com)
• The Real Importance of Dream Predictions (socyberty.com)
• Some thoughts on Zikr from ” is a Fire… by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (mycaravanofdreams.com)
• To Become a Sufi: Do I Need to Join a Sufi Order? by Dr. Stewart Bitkoff (mycaravanofdreams.com)
• Carl Jung’s advice (cynthiawh.wordpress.com)
• Jung, Carl Gustav (earthpages.wordpress.com)
• How Many Sufis Are There in Islam? by Stephen Schwartz (mycaravanofdreams.com)