A New Vision of Consciousness

The Introduction to Our Selves

The moment of awakening is a very special time in our lives. It may happen while we are awake, it may be the result of a dream, or it may occur during meditation. It is always accompanied by a heightened awareness — our perceptions and feelings are intensified and we experience a sense of new perspectives. The moment of awakening is well-illustrated by the case of Marilyn, a woman in her thirties who had a strong sense of identification with the role of "mother." Throughout her life, she treated everyone she encountered as a mother would treat a child. She had taken it upon herself to care for the world; this attitude was her "goat nature." After she entered therapy she had the following dream. It appeared at that moment of awakening when Marilyn began to separate from her maternal nature, when she began to awaken from the "sleep" she had mistaken for reality.

Sounds have become acute. There is so much noise and confusion I cannot rest. I finally become fully awake and I look about me. It is as if I were in a strange house and yet I know it is my house and I have lived in it for a long time. There is a mirror across from my bed and I glance at it. I am horrified to see that I have grown old while I slept. The noise is deafening and I go out to try to find where it is coming from. As I reach the kitchen door, I realize it comes from there. Around the kitchen table are many people, some young, some far older than I am. They are all dressed in children's clothes and are waiting to be fed. They see me and begin to pound their bowls on the table and call me "mother." I see my priest across the room with his back to me, and I think he can surely explain this to me, but as I approach him he turns around and I see that he is wearing a bib and holding a bowl, too! I run back to the door to leave and, as I pass the table, I see my parents there, wearing bibs like all the rest. I reach the door as a man comes in. I know him to be my husband, although he is not the husband I had when I went to sleep. He makes a pass at me and I feel relieved, thinking at least he doesn't think I'm his mother. When I look at him, however, he is wearing knickers and his face is the face of a child. I think that this is a nightmare and I run and shut myself in my room in order to wake up more fully, but I know I am not asleep. I ask myself over and over again: "What have I done while I slept?" Ray comes into the room [Ray is a therapist in the city where she lived]. I think that surely he can help me to understand this, but he is crying because he has hurt his knee and wants me to bandage it.

This dream clearly shows Marilyn's moment of awakening. Until now, the only reality that she has known has been this self-programmed "mother" identity (her goat nature) that she has been locked into since early childhood. The dream image is so poignant — during the time she has been asleep she has grown old while everyone around her has become a child needing nurturing. But now Marilyn is awake and separating from her identification with her mother nature. She is looking at herself and her surroundings through newly opened eyes and thus is beginning to ask questions and search for something different. She is curious. She wants to discover what exists within her, other than this mother, and to move toward the fullness of her being. Much as our tiger/goat discovered his tiger self, Marilyn, too, will discover parts of her true nature that she has not known before.

The "roar of awakening" is not always a roar. We may experience it as a roar when it applies to our "tiger" selves — our sexuality or intense feelings — but many other facets of our true nature also await discovery. Ralph, a successful, hardworking, rational sixty-two-year-old man, had the following dream of discovery:

I am walking on a country road. Suddenly I hear a noise; it sounds like a cry. I look down and, to the side of the road, I see a hand sticking up from the earth. I am shocked and I run to the hand and start digging there. I dig deeper until I unearth the body of a child who is about three or four years of age. He is barely alive. I start to clean him off and I hold him to me.

In this dream, awakening comes as an unearthing of something that was buried long ago — the inner child. Ralph had spent his life identified with those traits that pushed him toward great financial and political success, yet something was missing from his life. He had never known a real intimacy with others. In this dream he began to deal with that intimacy as he made the remarkable discovery that a very important part of himself had been buried — his vulnerability, his fear of the world, his feelings of isolation, and his fear of abandonment. These qualities were embodied in the child who was "buried," one of Ralph's selves that had been fully repressed by the time he was four.

Sometimes the process of awakening to what lies within us is presented to us as a journey. This is a very common motif in dream symbolism. A fifty-year-old woman at the beginning of her voyage of personal discovery dreamed she had to go on a journey by herself, with no assistance from her husband or anyone else. The journey stretched ahead of her; it was a long and difficult process to find her way home. Her unconscious was portraying her evolving consciousness as a journey, a journey that each one of us must take alone. It is a long and often difficult way home, for in order to embrace our "tiger nature" and experience our roar of awakening, we must first meet and embrace the multitude of selves that make up the rich totality of our entire being. As we uncover each new self and learn to honor it, it becomes a source of information for us in our continuing journey.

After becoming aware of her strong maternal identification Marilyn (the woman who had dreamed of being a mother to everyone) realized she had also strongly identified with her rational self. She took up meditation, and this practice precipitated experiences far different from anything that she had known before. For example, one night she had a dream with a very religious flavor. It upset her because spirituality was not a legitimate part of her "goat nature" (rationality). The following experience resulted:

I awakened from a dream feeling very disturbed. I could not go back to sleep so I went down to the living room and lit a cigarette. The kitchen light was on, throwing a shaft of light into the living room, so I did not turn on any other light. Our living room rug is sand-colored and the path of light from the kitchen door illuminated it. I was idly looking at this portion of the rug when it suddenly...