Radical Dreaming
Change your thoughts and solve your problems…
Most people will tell you that to fix your problems, you have to think more: more productively, more logically, more graciously. More, better, thoughts lead to better outcomes.
What if this is incorrect?
What if, instead, a radically different truth dictates our happiness?
First consider that most of our problems are basically the same. We all have ennui about living in our modern age; feeling empty, listless, useless, disconnected. Social media has not helped: we are more connected, but less happy. More news, more efficiency, more stuff, has not helped. We should also be worried about having screwed up our environment, and our planet, in big ways — probably ways we can’t repair.
Humans all worry about death and daily frustrations too, but a lot of our worry arises from the specific society we live in. The modern person is fundamentally a thinker: a rational agent, maximizing efficiencies and manipulating a world that has no intrinsic value.
We’re left being consumers — of religion, news, academic papers, cereal, and ads. We’re out of touch with anything real — with anything outside our own heads. This is the limitation of modern existence: we live entirely in conscious, rational, thoughts. Emotions intrude occasionally, but mostly in the form of desires: we want to buy something, want to bang someone, or want to get into heaven. The full range of emotional life is foreign to us.
What exactly have we lost touch with?
With nature, yes — with things not of our own creation, and not under our control; with things that have their own lives, their own experiences, and their own value. So yes, nature.
But I don’t just mean that we all need to take a walk in the woods. We need also to connect with the basic firmament of the world: to feel that everything around us has a deep existence, is alive in some sense, and that we are part of it. An experience of unity is common to most religions, after all (including those that far predate the current “world” religions). We need to remember that.
Now comes the radical part.
In between experiences of unity-with-all-creation and a deep-love-of-nature comes something else: connection to a hidden world of imagination, myth, and story. This “world” exists outside of time; is something like a dream, but not exactly a dream; and seems to be a communal consciousness — or at least a shared perception — that we can touch, if we try. In my view, this dream world is generated by all material in the universe, because all matter is alive. But it is strongest and most specific around other life; around trees, and grass, and animals, who all participate in their own way.
We can access the dream world in various ways. But it is fundamentally an act of empathy, imagination, and intuition. This dream-world is a world many past societies have been able to access, but we have largely forgotten about it. It is not a world of rationality, or efficiency, or theories, but of direct experience, connection, and flowing consciousness.
Too radical?
You could be forgiven for being skeptical of all this. After all, we’re taught that rationality will prevail — in science, technology, and even philosophy. (And modern religion also emerges from a belief in abstractions; in argument; in universal rules and systems.) This is the normal starting point for modern people.
It may thus seem ludicrously archaic, pagan, or “touchy-feely” to think about the aliveness of things; to think about tapping into a dream world; or to think about having radical, empathetic experiences in nature. But these experiences are not strange in the scheme of human history; they were taken for granted by human beings for tens of thousands of years as we hunted, gathered, told stories, and made friends with the “spirits” around us.
Still. You might think: Perhaps what is old and dead should stay buried? Isn’t animism and its ilk just superstition? Just illusions of psychology? No more, I think, than our idea that numbers “exist,” or that laws control our lives, or that argument will carry the day. These are all mental constructs, made by us. They are certain lenses we view the world through. They are basically magic. They give us power, but they also bind us; limit us. It’s hard to imagine what we can’t imagine, after all; hard to think we could think differently. But we can. And we should.
Old ways of seeing
People today are rediscovering snippets of those old way of seeing things: with shamanism (Harnerism), paganism, ayahuasca, and various other explorations. Some of these practices may be more helpful than others, and they won’t be sufficient on their own. After all, we’re not hunter gatherers. Our world is different. We know how to write, how to program, and how to theorize — very different ways of thinking that we can’t just forget.
So we’ll need to adapt that old wisdom, integrating it somehow with the rest of our store of human knowledge. That may sound very difficult, but its a task we’ve taken on before, as a species: we once learned to have priests and money and armies, but didn’t forget old rituals; we once learned how to write and do math and make laws, but didn’t forget about storytelling — not entirely, anyway.
Why are people rediscovering what is old, and trying to make use of it today? Because what shamans, mystics, healers, and animists of all sorts had is precisely what we modern people are missing: a deep, intuitive connection to the world around them, which places their life in a larger context of meaning and story. By missing these things, we’ve done ourselves a lot of harm; and harmed a lot of what’s around us too. People a yearning for something very different: a very radical departure from what is normal today.
Meaning
If you are still skeptical, consider this. We could say that our neurons fire and our blood pressure rises when our visual cortex interpolates the face of our genetic progeny after a long duration of absence. We could. But is that the way we want to see the world? We have a choice about that: about how to see and how to live. We’re people after all, and we must live our lives at a human scale — not at the scale of atoms, and not the scale of theories.
All humans need ways of finding meaning, but currently I see very little on offer. We can choose many things in our modern world, but who knows which is best? Should we maximize our genes? Our careers? Our “likes”? Our moral high ground? In fact, we should forget the question entirely: we should not be maximizing anything — even though maximizing is the hammer we all hold in our hand.
Instead, we need aliveness — and by seeing it around us, we will find it in ourselves too.
