Physical Spirituality

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Table of Contents

Part I:

Modes of Interaction

Interactions
Features of Connective and Binding Interactions
Spatial Arrangements
Connectivity and Architectivity
The Relevance of Scale

Part II:

Modes of Meaning

Serial Meanings of the Architective Mode
Serial Meanings of the Connective Mode
Features of Serial Meaning
Sentience
The Architective Dominion

Part III:

Modes of Spirituality

Spiritual Possibilities
Unimodal Deities
A Personal Perspective

Part IV:

Changing the Paradigm

Morality
The Unsung Virtues of Sublimation
Psychedelics in Perspective
Connectivity, Architectivity, Yin and Yang
Faith and Reason
Cosmic Consciousness in Perspective
To Sleep, to Dream -->
Conclusion
The Post Planetary Age

Appendices and References

Chapter 20: To Sleep, to Dream


The sun and the moon are major influences in our lives, specifically in the diurnal and lunar cycles we respond to. We move between sleep and wakefulness with the cycle of night and day while womens' reproductivity cycles with the moon, for example.

Our interactions with both these heavenly bodies are purely connective. No architective interaction with either is possible except indirectly, say through our construction of calendars and clocks, and secondary items like bill payment deadlines. I suggest that it is our connective capacities that are most affected by sleep.

I see my dreams to be even more dominated by architectivity than my waking life. Dreams offer a different reality to our waking reality, and that reality appears to be of an even more concerted architectivity. My dreams often involve logistics - navigating cities, buildings, train and road networks; usually accompanied by a need to reach a specific goal, the path to which is littered with obstacles. While my architective awareness of the dreamscape is relatively unaltered, my connective perceptions appear to be seriously diminished. For example, I seem to able to commit the most heinous crimes in my dreams without compassion - and suffer them without feeling pain. My dreams can be humorous, horrendous or satisfying, but they are almost never loving or harmonious.

The most obvious clue to the dominance of architectivity in our dreams is the persistent presence of one's separate self as a central player.

Meditation is possibly a means of getting one's architective perceptions to quiesce rather than one's connective perceptions. One night I had a dream in which I took LSD and tripped. I woke up immediately afterward and noted that although I had been enjoying the trip, it was nothing like tripping as I have consciously come to know it. I suggest it is not possible to replicate the psychedelic or meditative experience in a dream state because of the paucity of connectivity in that state.

So we should take care when imparting a spiritual significance to our sleeping dreams, for that significance (if any) is likely to be largely if not entirely architective. We should take even greater care when attempting to apply dreamtime revelations to our waking lives for they are likely to be seriously imbalanced, and if they do serve a spiritual purpose it is likely to be an architective one. Our dreams speak the language of our Planetary Deity, not the Cosmic Deity.

I am toying too with the idea that this even greater architective preponderance in dreaming is a clue to the identity of our Planetary Deity. Jungian psychology places great value on our dreams being a gateway to a "collective unconscious". Jung populated this collective unconscious with the symbols, archetypes and myths that have accumulated through the eons of human history, even through the experience of our evolutionary predecessors. In the light of the present discussion, this collective unconscious could be regarded as the processional spirit of our species or even of our planet. It may even constitute the personification of our Planetary Deity that I find so elusive. Interestingly, it also means that the collective unconscious Jung has described is confined to our planet (or, looking into the future, to within the scope of human architective reach) and that other planets with their resident organisms would host completely separate and different collective unconsciousnesses.

The Jungian connection is also interesting in that Jung interpreted dreams in terms of their symbolism. Regarding dreams as being rich in architectivity makes it easy to see why they would lend themselves to symbolic expression. Jung's visions and dreams, as described in his Red Book, are overwhelmingly architective. It is only in his interpretations of them, subsequently done in the waking state, that elements of connectivity appear.

Though connective awareness is rare in my dreams, I see my dream behaviour exhibiting both a conscious and subconscious awareness, such that my negotiation of connective phenomena is mostly subconscious. If I am right, this is in conflict with Jung's use of the term 'unconscious' to describe dreaming. I see a need for a more precise vocabulary, so that we might be 'unconscious' of things that are hidden from both our conscious and subconscious awareness.


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